More or Less Contemporary Music

* Ustvolskaya: Symphony No. 3 "Jesus Messias, errette uns!"
* Rihm: Music for Clarinet and Orchestra (Ueber die Linie II)
* Zimmermann: Photoptosis - Prelude for Large Orchestra

Valeri Scherstanoi (narrator), Joerg Widmann (clarinet), Bavarian Radio
Symphony Orchestra/Markus Stenz, Sylvain Cambreling (Rihm)
Col legno WWE 1CD 20083  {DDD} TT: 65:07

Summary for the Busy Executive:  Exhibits from the "hard" wing of the
20th-century music museum.

I'm singing with an amateur chorus, which two days from now will perform
a concert.  The chorus splits in two:  a community chorus and a chamber
chorus of the better musicians.  The chamber chorus will sing rather easy,
but lovely, pieces by one Michael Horvit.  They are tonal, even somewhat
modal in "feel," eschewing messy counterpoint.  A significant part of the
chamber choir - the better musicians, remember - is having fits trying
to learn this music.  A fellow bass confided to me he hated atonal music
and that twentieth-century music in general scared him (this Horvit is
eminently tonal; it merely changes keys quickly -- about as quickly as
Wagner's Tristan).  The music, he felt, was just too difficult, too
"intellectual" (in a bad way).  Actually, the Beethoven Missa Solemnis
(which we will perform later this year) is far more difficult and
"intellectual" than the little Horvit chorales we were trying.  The fellow
knows the Beethoven is incredibly difficult, but he's nevertheless willing
to put in the effort to jump the hurdles.  For the life of me, I can't
tell you why.  The twentieth century is over.  That train has long left
the station.  Beefing about Bartok makes as much sense as moaning over
Mendelssohn.  Classical composers, who can't make a decent living from
their music, are going to write the way they want to write, since there's
no percentage at all trying to cater to an ignorant audience, unless you
don't mind selling out to the New Age.  And the audience is, to a great
extent, grossly ignorant.  This means, of course, that the gap between
composer and public widens, rather than narrows, and I'm by no means
convinced that this is mainly the composer's fault.

Forget the Horvit for a moment:  I listen to the works on this CD and feel
as though I'm watching the Saurians become extinct or the highest learning
of the civilization retreat to hermit caves.  I don't mean by this that we
have here three masterpieces doomed to neglect.  There are good reasons for
not liking any of them, but I doubt most people have the frame of reference
in which those reasons can be found.  In short, one reason for the feeling
of drift in music of the postwar era is that we can no longer distinguish
not only such gross things as one style from another, but the more elusive
one voice from another or even good from bad.  The lack of refinement in
critical judgment gives the game away.  The tar brush has become way too
broad because too many haven't the knowledge and skill to use a smaller
one.

Is this elitist? You bet.  I think knowing better than not knowing.
I admit the possibility of great instincts arriving at a reasonable
critical point, but I don't admit many have them.  Besides, knowledge
helps articulate instinct.  Enough rant.  If this CD sells 1,000 copies,
the silver screw in my belly button will loosen and my rear end will drop
off, from sheer surprise.

One distinguishing feature of new music is, in many cases, a sense of
drama different than the 19th and classic 20th Centuries.  Charles Rosen,
I believe, cites an illuminating Haydn quote about how the composer learned
to write symphonies from writing opera buffa.  With Beethoven and Brahms
(or even Hindemith, Schoenberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky, for that matter),
one gets the sense of movement of a story or a play.  However, with
Ustvolskaya, Rihm, and Zimmermann, the movement of the music resembles
more a painting or the singularity of mood in a lyric poem.  The spatial
"movement" of the music is "deep" rather than "wide." That is, we don't
get a tale well-told or a journey from here to there, but (to swipe a
Boulez metaphor) the complex swirl of particles in Brownian motion inside
a beaker.  We've had this before in Western music, in the masterpieces of
the Renaissance, say pre-1620, and it's really only been 250 or so years
of the other.  Rather than tell a story, the music paints a picture.  It's
as if composers ignored the temporal aspect of the art.

Ustvolskaya, who in her early work showed the influence of Shostakovich,
remains in many ways the most traditional composer here, but she's not
all that traditional.  She calls her piece a symphony, but it's certainly
not a symphony as Shostakovich or even Brahms would have understood it.
Musically, it insists on its materials almost to the point of monomania,
with very little (but just enough) contrast to distinguish an exposition,
a middle of some sort, and a recapitulation.  The subtitle of the symphony,
"Jesus Messias, errette uns!" (Jesus, Messiah, save us!), is, as far as
I can tell (liner notes give no help, and the language is Russian), also
the text, twice declaimed by the narrator.  The music is unrelentingly
deliberate and bleak -- the soundtrack to hell, or at least dystopia.
Ustvolskaya clearly thinks we all need saving.  The intensity of it might
wear some people down -- I plan a good long rest before I tackle it again
-- but it does keep interest for its more than eighteen minutes.

One of Europe's hottest composers, Wolfgang Rihm has begun to carve a
career in the United States as well.  I first heard of him only a couple
of years ago, and I managed later to attend the premiere of his Concerto
for String Quartet and Orchestra in Cleveland with the Emerson String
Quartet conducted by Dohnanyi.  The work did little for me, other than lull
me into an uneasy hypnogogic state.  It just went on and on and on.  Like
the man who'd been beating his head against the wall, I felt so good when
it stopped.  You can understand that I approached the Music for Clarinet
a bit gingerly.  On the other hand, I'm glad the opportunity came my way.
The work grabbed me immediately with a wonderful, lyrically poetic opening
and kept its hold -- one more reason to pay attention to individual works
rather than to artistic movements or even to composers.  Ultimately, it
doesn't matter which technique a composer chooses or whose signature
appears on the title page of the score.

Rihm subtitles his piece "Ueber die Linie II" (about the line, II).
Apparently, there was an "Ueber die Linie I." My ear doesn't find a
necessary connection between the subtitle and the music, but it might
have been something to get Rihm going.  Certainly, the clarinet can spin
out long, seamless lines of music, and that's much of the opening.  But
other things happen as well, including almost-jazzy fast sections (with
bongos, yet), an extended passage that reminds one of such traditional
structures as sarabande and chaconne.  The work runs over half an hour,
and it not only kept my interest, it actually moved me.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Photoptosis, from 1968, is by far the oldest
piece on the CD, and it shows its age.  It typifies the main compositional
trends of the Sixties and Seventies -- rhythmically static, gestures rather
than themes, an emphasis on changing sonorities, somewhat like watching
a lava lamp -- without giving anything new or individual.  It's all very
expert and very uninvolving.  At 14 minutes, it seems to last twice as long
as the Rihm.

Everything receives at least a decent, professional performance.  Widmann,
Rihm's clarinet soloist, is outstanding, and the orchestra plays with
greater assurance under Cambreling than under Stenz.  If I can imagine
better performances of the Ustvolskaya and the Rihm, it doesn't detract
from the commitment of these.  It's hard to sustain the illusion of
unremitting intensity in the Ustvolskaya (the music has to relax somewhere
for the intensity to keep its effect), and finding those places is the job
of the conductor.  The Rihm switches moods subtly and the performers never
leave the track of the composer's thought.

One final carp:  The liner notes are unhelpful, even bloody awful --
infested with the obfuscatory, pretentious prose that plagues social
science, certain schools of European philosophy, deconstructionist
criticism, as well as writing about new music.  Rihm doesn't help his own
cause with his remarks about the piece.  He comes across as artistically
muddled and empty, an impression which the music itself emphatically
contradicts.  But he's not alone.  The other writers -- Viktor Suslin and
Joern Pieter Hiekel -- have caught the same disease and do the same little
dance.  It's a way to show that they've got something Serious and Important
to say.  One word won't do when you can circumlocute with five.  It's a
thicket of words around the work.  It keeps listeners out, rather than lets
them in, and it fosters the impression not only that these folks hide their
lack of perception in cow pies, but that they hide an essential emptiness
in the music.  This does not serve the music or, frankly, the writers
themselves.

Steve Schwartz