Gregory Fulkerson



Cadenzas and Variations

1995







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Notes

  • A TWENTIETH-CENTURY OVERVIEW.

    • When one looks at the complex history of Western music from roughly the turn of the seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth, a fundamental given emerges: Music was in a key, a tonality, albeit a constantly evolving one. But, though tonality was the force that bound seemingly inimical musical approaches together (Bach's complex contrapuntal music and Vivaldi's skeletal, homophonic music, for example), no such binding force has materialized in this century.

    For American composers, isolated to some extent from the deeply embedded tyranny of European tradition, the break with that tradition was more easily effected. Because music did not become a widespread curriculum in the American academic system until well after the beginning of the twentieth century, composers were not as affected as their counterparts on the Continent by the often reactionary nature of many European conservatories. And although Charles Ives did attend Yale and study with Horatio Parker, it is likely that his musical imagination was affected more by the sounds of New England picnics and firehouse bands than by conservatories and prim salons, as Harry Partch later would be more influenced by Yaqui Indian chant, white only surlily tolerating the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin, which helped support him in the forties and fifties. (For the American rejection of European tradition, see W. Mellers' excellent "New Music in a New World" in Twentieth Century Music, edited by Rollo H. Myers.)

    For some composers the loss of tradition created an excruciating impasse, a cultural no man's land. For others it provided an embarrassment of riches and the freedom to call on all traditions or, as legitimately, to reject them all. Whatever the choice, the diverse currents and crosscurrents of compositional activity in the twentieth century have one thing in common: a ceaseless energy devoted to redefining what is meaningful in music. This has led to an investigation anew of form, melody, harmony, and color, as well as expressive and material concerns.

    A number of antithetical solutions have emerged. This century has seen the refined, ultranational sophistication of Milton Babbitt (NW 80466-2) and Pierre Boulez, and simultaneously the primal art of Harry Partch (NW 80214-2). It has witnessed the potent hysteria of expressionism in Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, and the cool detachment and understated character of Morton Feldman. It has also seen composers whose works are overtly or implicitly political-Kurt Well, Hanns Eisler, Herbert Brün, and the more recent music of Christian Wolff-and composers who would deny any connection between music and the machinations of this century's politics.

    Indeed, one can look on twentieth-century music as a fabric of interwoven lines, crisscrossing, fusing, and diverging, creating a contradictory, often fascinating tapestry, the result of the dissolution of a unifying tradition. And like the larger picture of twentieth-century music, the composers represented on this recording converge and diverge in many areas, both philosophically and aurally.

    Philip Glass (b. 1937) received a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a master's degree from The Juilliard School. He held a Ford Foundation grant from 1962 to 1964 but felt a growing dissatisfaction with the music he was writing at the time. He later told David Bither of Horizon magazine (March, 1980):

    "At that point I had reached a kind of dead-end with the music, I couldn't do it anymore. Not that I couldn't, I could turn it out easily. That was the problem, I just didn't believe in it anymore".

    Indeed, a fundamental problem began to intrude itself:

    "I didn't have anything of my own to say. I was so busy imitating academic music that I'd never really understood the fundamentals".

    So he went to Paris to join a distinguished list of composers who had studied with Nadia Boulanger. While there he met Ravi Shankar and notated Shankar's score to the film Chappaqua. This exposure to Indian music opened up a new musical world. Glass told Charles Michener of Newsweek (May 26, 1975):

    ". . there was a way to write music that would take me outside my own history. . . Ravi, not drugs, was my acid trip. It was like totally clearing ail my decks, and overnight I began writing a completely different kind of music".

    On his return to this country in 1967 he began composing a bare, static, single-line music, from which were purged chromaticism and modulation. This back-to-scratch unison music eschewed the seemingly unnatural and unfulfilling rigor of the complex music of the universities ("I found twelve-tone music ugly and didactic", Glass told Robert Jones of Cue Magazine in May 1978). The disappearance of foundation support and the lack of university interest in Glass's work attests to the fact that this new music was far outside the mainstream of the avant-garde (if the oxymoron will be permitted). From 1967 to 1974 he performed his music in New York lofts, and his principal support came from artists and art foundations, especially those of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Glass told John Rockwell in a 1972 New York Times interview:

    "My ideas were very close to those of painters and sculptors in the mid-sixties but they weren't derived from them.

    . . .Artists aren't very intellectual, and my music is very accessible. It has a physical presence people can respond to. Artists are very eager to get art out of the academy."

    Glass's progress from the monophonic ground zero has been, like the term he uses to describe his compositional procedure, "additive"; he has labored to expand, develop, and add interest in musical areas he had left static. The considered anti-intellectualism, the lack of interest in rigorously logical, linear processes has remained, and is illustrated by his collaboration with Robert Wilson, the opera Einstein on the Beach, which was premiered in 1976. Significantly, the Einstein of this work is a dreamer. The emphasis in this nonlinear collection of events and scenes is on intuition, visceral sensations, dreams, fantasies, and disjointed images, not on progressive development.

    The influence of Eastern philosophy on Western art has been felt for several decades, but Philip Glass's contribution to Eastern-inspired music has been unique. Unlike his predecessors, he uses musical materials familiar to Western audiences. The philosophical underpinnings, concerned with the meditative and transcendental, are expressed in materials indigenous to Western music, transforming a foreign culture's aesthetic and philosophical orientation into a language we can understand. This synthesis between Eastern aesthetic ideology and Western musical materials may account for Glass's popularity with a broad audience. He has taken music out of the academy and put it into parks, museums, churches, rock clubs, even traditional concert halls and opera houses-and has generated an audience enthusiasm and acclaim that the majority of today's composers of serious music never attain.

  • VIOLIN SOLO MUSIC FROM "EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH".

    • Philip Glass's suite from Einstein on the Beach consists of violin music from the opera's "knee plays" ("joints" that separate and flank the work's nine scenes). The suite exemplifies the composer's interest in additive structures-repeating cells and phrases with various slight alterations, removals, or additions of pitches reminiscent of Indian compositional techniques, The result is an elastic, contracting and expanding phrase structure that examines and reexamines the same material from slightly different angles.

    The form of the work can be outlined as follows:

    A B A' C A " B A' C'

    The basis of the "A" section is a four-note motive of ascending half steps and a whole step: B C Db D#. Reminiscent of a Baroque ground bass, this motive is repeated several times. However, interpolated between the pitches of the main motive are changing arpeggios (descending and ascending chains outlining triads). The frequency of the occurrence of the motivic tones, and the resultant rhythmic configurations, depend on how elaborate the interpolations are. The "B" section is easily recognized by the slower tempo and espressivo character. A relationship can be drawn between the predominant construction of this section and the Baroque passacaglia, as an unaltered series of chords provides the harmonic underpininig on which the melodies are elaborated. The "C" section is characterized by strings of ascending and descending scales, easily distinguished from the "A" and "B" sections, both of which are composed of arpeggios rather than scales.


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    GlassPages - Philip Glass on the Web

    http://www.glasspages.org/