Sail Norse Rail?

This is a triptych detailing the process I used to create an imaginary transit map for the Luther College campus, similar to John Coltrane's sketch of A Love Supreme, some of Pat Steir's visual work, and the musical idea of building from a riff.. The first panel is a custom map in Google Maps - a rough sketch of my idea (my "riff," if you will). The second panel is my first stab at stylizing the shapes I created in my sketch. The third panel is the finished product.

Music is Magic

            John Cage’s musical and aesthetic philosophies hinge on his fight against the separation of sound from music. In his 1937 manifesto, he expressed his desire for modern music to be about sound rather than structure and melody. His famous 4’33” explores this idea to the extreme, sacrificing pitch and rhythm all together and using silence itself as the prevailing sound, forcing the listener to pay close attention to the surprisingly dynamic nature of silence for the duration of the piece. In many ways, Cage’s music is a response to the rapid urbanization of America in the early 20^th Century. He wants to call to mind factories, streets, machinery, and other quintessentially urban sounds as music for a more and more city-dwelling Western world. This emphasis on noise is defined more clearly by a separate emphasis on chance, randomness, and even whimsy throughout Cage’s music. He uses the mechanics of the arbitrary to separate traditional structured music from the noise and sounds he is more interested in. Rather than keeping time with a metronome and choosing rhythmic and pitch value based on standards of traditional music theory, Cage uses a star chart to guide his composition in Atlas Eclipticalis. The locations and brightnesses of the stars create a new rhythmic and musical structure based on natural, extra-musical, and virtually arbitrary forces.

            Laurie Anderson’s music, by contrast, is much less revolutionary in terms of the mechanical workings of music. Rather, she uses fairly simple and essentially traditional means of music-making as tool for artistic commentary. While it is often worthwhile to discuss her manipulation of musical norms, such as the ambiguous sonority she creates by alternating between a first-inversion Ab major and a root position C minor in O Superman, her main focus is clearly on the implications of those manipulations and of her work as a whole. Anderson comes from the artistic traditions of Fluxus and performance art, and draws on many fundamentally feminist ideas throughout her repertoire. Fluxus is an avant-garde “anti-art” movement, pointing out the (European) artificiality of imitative traditional art and, conversely, the beauty and meaning of “non-art.” That same chordal dichotomy in O Superman is an example of this idea – the respective sonorities of Ab major first inversion and C minor root position are what create the beauty and meaning, not their endless manipulation. Performance art involves the effort to reintegrate the body into art in the Western world, a society with an enormous amount of discomfort with the human body and a troubling amount of normalized body shaming. Anderson uses her body as a core component of her music. Much of it could not really be performed by anyone else. She uses body percussion and dance elements to aggressively humanize her work.

            Osvaldo Golijov’s music is a celebration and exploration of the Latin American experience. Like Anderson, he is less concerned with changing the theoretical landscape of music and more concerned with using music as a tool to commentate, give voice, and raise cultural awareness and understanding. His La Pasión según de San Marcos specifically involves the Latin American experience of Christianity as well as his own interpretation of the story of Jesus as a non-Christian composer. It is indirectly a response to the Western European liturgical and sacred music traditions that have been (and mostly still are) the face of Christian church music and of concert music as a whole for hundreds of years. The arrest scene in La Pasión, for example, is set to a Latin American dance beat and uses a Brazilian capoeiran dancer – a stark contrast to the Passions of Bach.

            My musical and aesthetic philosophies are as follows:

·         Music is communication inherently and exists to be shared. Music cannot exist without a performer and a listener (even if these two parties are sometimes the same person).

·         Music is performed primarily for the good of the audience, not for the good of the performer. Music may be an expression of the performer and may draw specific physical and/or cognitive attention to the performer, but it must nonetheless be considered first from the perspective of the listener’s benefit, not of the performer’s benefit.

·         The musical benefit for the performer is nevertheless exceedingly important. Without active performer involvement, there is nothing to draw the listener’s attention, and therefore only one party is involved and the performance is unsuccessful.

·         Music can give voice to every culture, gender identity, sexuality, belief system, ethnicity, social and economic class, and ability. Music is a tool to prevent and counteract oppressive silencing.

·         Since music serves as a cultural voice, the cultural diversity inherent to music must be upheld and respected in all cases, and musical communication from oppressed groups must be given credence and authority.

·         Music and musical involvement are potentially therapeutic and healing for listener, performer, and composer alike, and this power is a fundamental reason for its existence.

Structural Disintegrity

            We are so excited this evening to welcome our keynote speaker, experimental composer and visual and performance artist Laurie Anderson. A native of Chicago, Anderson is an alumna of Barnard College and Columbia University. She found her artistic voice in the cultural stew of downtown New York City’s arts scene in the early 1970s and has grown to become one of the most persistent, emphatic, and creative female voices in music. In 1979, Anderson premiered her work United States at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an eight-hour stage exploration of transportation, politics, money, and love in the United States. She became NASA’s first ever (and last ever) artist in residence in 2003. Her most well-known work by far is O Superman from 1981, which reached number two on the UK pop charts. The eight-minute work tackles the ubiquity of dichotomy and conflict – the difference between stability and instability, direction and atmosphere, hope and dread, fear and joking, and the reality that these differences are often inescapable.

Anderson’s art represents a radical departure from, as well as a feminist answer to the misogynist undertones of previous experimental art movements such as Futurism, Dadaism, and Fluxus. As the fight for women’s suffrage gain steam at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Futurist movement published its manifesto, promising to “glorify … scorn for women” and to “fight moralism [and] feminism” (Le Figaro 1909). Anderson helps to steer experimental art away from its misogynist history by rejecting the fundamental notions of the gender binary and prohibitive gender roles, questioning and undermining the very structure of the historically male-dominated world of traditional analysis and composition, and challenging the Western discomfort with the human body. In United States, Anderson portrays herself as androgynous, denying the historical and problematic tendency of the female body being subverted and delegitimized by the male gaze. Her extensive use of technology and electronics in her performances is indicative of her overall departure from societal expectations about women’s relationships with machines and, more importantly, power. Anderson’s music is also less goal-oriented and more atmospheric, as well as harmonically less complicated than traditional music, encouraging more creative and interpretive analyses and reactions than traditional music theory dictates. She is unashamedly within her body during performance, refusing to give credence to what musicologist Susan McCrary defines as Western culture’s “puritanical, idealist suspicion of the body” (McCrary 136). Hers is art that needs to be seen to be appreciated. Bodyless recordings and virtuosic symphony orchestras hiding themselves in black clothes cannot convey the whole story of Anderson’s work, which often includes elements of body percussion, vocal modification, and dance. Anderson is a prolific feminist figure and a major force in modern music. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Laurie Anderson.

Taking Chance

            This exhibit will focus on the relationship between chance and artwork in the twentieth century, especially as it applies to our perceptions of what art is intended to represent. The exhibit will feature works by Cage, Calder, Vasarely, Frankenthaler, and Rodchenko.

Played on a continuous loop will be a recording of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis (1961). Cage composed this work by placing star charts from astronomer Antonin Becvár’s 1950 star atlas Atlas Eclipticalis 1950.0 into the context of musical organization. The cosmic element of apparent randomness that determines star sizes, brightnesses, and locations can manifest itself in the music as pitch, volume, and even instrumentation.

CALDER: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/ashleaebeling/files/2012/05/Calder-Snow-Flurry-1948.jpg

At the center of the room will hang Alexander Calder’s mobile Snow Flurry (1948). Like Cage, Calder uses elements of randomness to depict an unpredictable event; i.e. snowfall. Since so little of it stays still, the mobile form of sculpture is inherently driven by chance, and it needs to be seen in person in its kinetic environment to be fully experienced. Cage uses the natural randomness of outer space to help create structure, whereas Calder creates a fairly rigid (though still freely moveable) structure and allows the randomness of environment to change how it is perceived.

VASARELY: http://www.rogallery.com/Vasarely_Victor/w-1083/vasarely-print-zebras.html

On one wall will hang Victor Vasarely’s optical art Zebras (1989). Optical art plays with perspective, color, and the arrangement of negative space to trick the eye into seeing lines, shapes, and even occasionally movement that is not actually there. This work depicts two intertwined zebras using only white lines on black background. Like Atlas Eclipticalis, this work creates a representative structure (Atlas of the stars and Zebras of two zebras) without explicitly demarcating any part of that structure.

FRANKENTHALER: http://uploads3.wikipaintings.org/images/helen-frankenthaler/mountains-and-sea-1962.jpg

On another wall will hang Helen Frankenthaler’s oil painting Mountains and Sea (1952). This is another example of the suggestion of a given structure or concrete real-world item without the explicit depiction or demarcation of that item. Where Vasarely uses optical illusion to convey that intention, Frankenthaler uses color and shape – similar to Cage, who uses characteristic aspects of the stars to help define the characteristic aspects of the music.

RODCHENKO: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/1915_Dance_by_Rodchenko.jpg/367px-1915_Dance_by_Rodchenko.jpg

            Finally, on a third wall will hang Alexander Rodchenko’s Dance, An Objectless Composition (1915). Rodchenko creates the atmosphere of chaotic motion with color, shape, and the interactivity of lines, similar to Frankenthaler, though with a bit more defined structure. This work serves as another example of a specific idea conveyed with nonspecific information, the same way that Cage conveys the idea of space and awareness of space by calling attention to silence as punctuated by sound.

1905 and Now

            Having received numerous complaints and queries from members of our community regarding the Driftless Philharmonic’s upcoming performances of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11: The Year 1905, I have decided to write and address these concerns as fully as I can in hopes of emphasizing the relevance and importance of the music in question. Public discourse is a welcome and necessary aspect of the musical process and it is my pleasure to see the community so excited and involved, even if much of the discussion antagonizes the Driftless Phil and our programmatic choices. I would like to make clear that we will not be altering our concert program in any way and that we will still be performing Symphony no. 11 as planned next month, but I am happy to acknowledge criticisms of its appropriateness and do my best to explain its value.

            We have received complaints regarding three broad aspects of the work and its historical context. First of these is the subject matter of the musical plot – this symphony’s subtitle, The Year 1905 refers to the Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg, Russia in January of 1905, an event that helped fuel the Bolshevik uprising that dismantled the old Tsarist system and created what we remember as Soviet Russia. There is no text or visual accompaniment to Symphony no. 11, but the musical scenes of the second and third movements clearly depict the violent killing and wounding of upwards of four thousand working-class Russians. Some members of our community object to the frankness of this depiction, especially with regard to its perceived inappropriateness for younger concert-goers. I have no desire to dictate parenting methods, but pain and suffering are integral facts of artistry that are as deeply rooted in music as are joy and love. Symphony no. 11 is unambiguous, but it is far from alone in its genre. This aspect of the work is also historically significant in that the symphony premiered in 1957, a year after a violent and costly uprising in Budapest that solidified the Soviet government’s powerful grip on its constituent regions. This uprising and the violence surrounding it were so fresh in the minds of the symphony’s first listeners that connections were inevitably drawn and the music served as a new way to understand and even cope with that suffering. Today, music about pain still has an important place in culture to facilitate the comprehension of atrocity and horror, and to shield the public from that opportunity may even be considered irresponsible.

            Other objections from our community relate to Shostakovich’s public identity as a Soviet puppet. Certainly most of his large works are examples of Soviet nationalism and socialist realism, but it is unclear how Shostakovich personally felt about the regime. One of Shostakovich’s earlier works, the opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk Distsrict, premiered in 1932, was publicly denounced after Stalin attended a performance in 1936 (the review in question may even have been written by Stalin himself). The following year, Shostakovich premiered his fifth symphony, with the written inscription “A Soviet artist’s creative response to justify criticism.” After Stalin’s death in 1953, Schostakovich began insert variations on the musical idea D-Eb-C-B, or, in the German musical system, D-es-C-H – in other words, “D. SCH” (for D. Schostakovich). Musicologist David Fanning asserts that “through the dictator’s death [Shostakovich] could begin to assert his own identity in his work.” This specific motive happens to appear in various forms all over Symphony no. 11, and while it is far from proof of Schostakovich’s political alignment, it is at least evidence that he thought and worked as his own person, not only as a puppet for the Soviet regime.

            The most complaints we have received come from community members who find the Soviet socialist realist aspects of Symphony no. 11 distasteful, un-American, and even propagandistic. After Stalin gained power, it was mandated that Russian art satisfy the idea of “socialist realism,” i.e. Russian art should use the glorified Common Man as subject matter, should be large and grand, should make an effort to include traditional folk material, and above all depict a socialist utopia that glorifies the Russian Motherland. It is difficult to deny that, at least on the surface, Symphony no. 11 satisfies every requirement. It tells the story of the beaten, massacred working class as they became inspired to rise up against tsarist tyranny. It clocks in at about an hour long and uses the full dynamic, musical, and emotional range of the orchestra, and each movement contains substantial melodic material adapted from Russian revolutionary songs. However, the fact that the work could have been used as propaganda does not make it inherently worthless, especially since we will never know Shostakovich’s true motivations. If in fact Shostakovich was conveying some secret anti-state message with his music, then performing it creates fascinating opportunities to explore the rebellious nature of art and composer motivation, and serves as a reminder of the subversive power of music. On the other hand, if the work is purely propagandistic, it still opens up important opportunities for discussion of art and music’s place in politics and power structures.

            Regardless of Shostakovich’s intentions or of the subject matter itself, Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 is regarded as one of the most important (and often most beautiful) works of the twentieth century. It is enjoyable even without its controversial historical context, but even concert-goers who are aware of its place in world history have the opportunity to use this performance as a chance to open up dialogue, not stop it before it begins.

Shosty and the Onion

            Shostakovich’s eleventh symphony is a deeply layered work whose content is inarguably patriotic on some level, regardless of the composer’s inscrutable private political leanings. Subtitled “The Year 1905,” Symphony no. 11 is a cinematic retelling of the events of “Bloody Sunday” – the massacre of disgruntled workers in St. Petersburg on January 9, 1905 which became a key component of the Russian Revolution and the dawn of the Soviet Union. The work holds up confidently to the scrutiny of socialist realism in its cinematic enormity, its prominent use of folk tunes, and its telling of the Bloody Sunday story from the workers’ (i.e. the common man’s) tragic point of view.

            The most easily identifiable of these aspects is the symphony’s size. The chronological size at least is difficult to ignore – there are no breaks between movements and the work is about an hour long. The orchestra itself is not remarkably big, but Shostakovich does tend to use full “choirs,” such as all the brass or all the strings at once, rather than single instruments. The sense of size is exaggerated by the enormous range of dynamics, of tempo, and of melodic pitch. He also includes the idee fixe of open fifths in octaves throughout the piece, lending to the work a sense of expansive continuity that enhances its size.

            Shostakovich also complies with socialist realism by taking the comman man’s point of view and using revolutionary folk tunes as the basis for most of the melodic material. In the expository first movement, The Palace Square, the stage is quietly set for rebellion and massacre. Most of the movement is soft and drawn-out with long string pedals and slow, low melodies. Occasionally, the melody “Listen” appears in a higher register as a reminder of the atrocities of the czarist regime. The carnage itself happens in the second movement, The 9^th of January, which is introduced by a fast ostinato in the low strings to the tune of Shostakovich’s own composition “Oh, Czar, our little father,” a melody that reappears throughout the rest of the symphony at varying speeds, pitches, and dynamics. At the end of the second movement, “Listen” reappears as the massacre ends and the scope of the tragedy comes into focus. The third movement, In Memoriam, depicts the horror of defeat and begins with the violas playing the folk tune “Worker’s Funeral March.” The final movement is The Tocsin, the alarm bell signaling revolution for the working man, set to loud, crashing, and often unison excerpts from folk tunes like “Rage, Tyrants” and “Vrashavianka.”

            Symphony 11 and many of Shostakovich’s other large works are comparable to the output of other regional composers in the 20^th century, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams in the United Kingdom and Aaron Copland in the United States. These composers all tried to depict a (generally idealized) musical image of their homelands at a time when regional identity was often a highly political matter. Copland’s experience with McCarthyism in particular parallels some of what Shostakovich dealt with, as does the cancellation of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer shortly after 9/11. Art is often so layered and subversive that it can be frightening to governments attempting to maintain security and safety. Politics can create opportunities for artists, but they can also create dangerous limitations.

Lincoln Hoedown

During the bulk of his career, Aaron Copland had an orchestral composition style that bore many similarities to those of his contemporaries and immediate successors. Copland orchestras are reasonably-sized – not chamber orchestras, but nothing close to the scale of Rite of Spring either. Lincoln Portrait employs and orchestra similar in size and structure to those used by Stravinsky in his later career after he began renouncing his earlier cultural radicalism, as well as to late-19^th-century composers such as Tchaikovsky. Like Stravinsky and Debussy, Copland most frequently features brass and winds rather than strings, which more often play mood- and atmosphere-setting pedals that give the piece character instead of the hefty melodic material you would find in a Mozart or Beethoven symphony. However, Copland’s use of orchestra is also much more harmonically simplistic and identifiably tonal than many of his contemporaries. Whereas a work like Wozzeck struggles to find itself in a recognizable diatonic triad, there is hardly ever doubt where Copland’s music sits.

            Like Stravinsky and the Realist composers of the early 20^th century, Copland is known for his use of folk music in his orchestral works. Unlike Stravinsky, however, who notably uses Russian folk music throughout Rite of Spring but works to establish a “folk aura” rather than calling attention to specific direct quotes, Copland displays his quotation prominently and even uses his folk music as a reference to specific place or time and to create deeper meaning. The ballet Rodeo features the folk tunes If He’d be a Buckaroo and (famously) Bonaparte’s Retreat as near-complete direct quotations. In Lincoln Portrait, the tune of Springfield Mountain is similarly prominently featured and may be a reference to Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Even when Copland does not quote folk tunes directly, Lincoln Portrait and Rodeo are structured to create an American version of the same type of “folk aura” that Stravinsky creates for Russian music in Rite of Spring.

            An uncommon feature of Lincoln Portrait is its inclusion of spoken text where another composer may have written for solo voice or choir. This choice reflects Copland’s desire to write accessible music – spoken text is more manageable for a wider American audience than solo operatic voice since there is so much more opportunity for the performer to experiment with inflections and enunciations that are more linguistically accessible to human ears and therefore easier to understand. Using spoken text also lifts the restriction of voice part for the performer and fits thematically with the subject of Abraham Lincoln, who is remembered as one of the greatest orators in Western history. In the absence of the structured meter of sung text, the timing for the speech is specifically marked within each relevant measure. There is also a long, drawn-out introduction before the speech begins. Both these qualities help sustain a stately, moderated atmosphere for the piece that further strengthens the presidential theme.

            Lincoln Portrait is a patriotic work, but not one that directly celebrates the war-weary America of the 1940s. Rather, it is nostalgic for a peaceful America with higher value for the freedom of the individual. Ironically, that America was still deeply divided by the Civil War and was therefore less united than the modern America of the time. In this sense, its patriotism is inauthentic. The prevailing message of the piece is that America was perhaps better off then, even if it was more divided.