Intersections: Program Notes

Ritual and Myth

Andre Jolivet - from Cinq Incantations, "At the funeral of the chief, to obtain protection of his soul." reading from Beowulf (anon.)

     Ritual and myth play a prominent role in Jolivet’s Cinq Incantations for solo flute. Written after the death of his mother, Jolivet fashioned his work after the events of an individual’s life within the context of an ancient tribal community. Although Jolivet held a long-standing interest in non-Western music and traditions, he sought not to emulate what he studied but to create his own ritualistic music through repetition, abrupt changes in dynamics, and monody. Jolivet wanted to return to a time when music was a form of magic and incantation, where music held the possibility of changing the world around us.The incantations are a violent and dramatic reflection of Jolivet’s image of the primitive world.

     The 5th incantation, “Aux funérailles du chef pour obtenir la protection de son àme” (At the funeral of the chief, to obtain protection of his soul) is perhaps a eulogy for his recently-deceased mother in the context of an ancient rite. High-pitched wails and percussive writing repeat again and again in a ritualistic chant that builds up to a frenzied, almost hypnotic state, looking for the catharsis that finally arrives at the end of the piece.

     The ritual of the funeral is a key element of the ancient saga of Beowulf. Traditionally viewed as a work built around three funerals, Beowulf inhabits a half-fictional, half-historical world where society is built on tribal ritual. Beginning and ending with the death of a chief, one can imagine the music of Jolivet as a real accompaniment to the ancient rites of death portrayed in Beowulf.

Character Sets 
Sigfried Karg-Elert - from 24 Caprices reading from The Jabberwocky (Carroll)

     Sigfried Karg-Elert was a German organist and composer active at the beginning of the 20th century. A self-proclaimed “outsider,” Karg-Elert drew influences from Bach to Debussy and used his formidable knowledge of music theory to stretch the boundaries of tonality in his works. Karg-Elert’s Caprices were a gift to his friend Carl Bartuzat of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Originally intended as etudes to link traditional and contemporary techniques, the Caprices at heart are a set of character pieces, a kind of musical time-travelogue beginning with the Baroque and traveling through Karg-Elert’s present-day. Echoes of Handel, Bach, and Stravinsky can be found in these light-hearted and sometimes quirky etudes.“Beware the the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!” Lewis Carroll’s The Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem steeped in literary tradition. Although words such as galumphing, vorpal, and frabjous permeate this poem, the meaning of every sentence is never lost and at heart, the Jabberwocky is a condensed epic saga in the character of Beowulf.

     In addition to being a play on traditional forms (Jabberwocky is a quatrain as well as an epic), it is also a study in linguistics. Somehow we know that galumphing is a form of heavy striding, almost akin to a horse galloping but with less agility. We can infer the meaning of the poem even through the web of made-up vocabulary, just as Karg-Elert can conjure the forms of the Baroque and Classical eras while straying from traditional harmony. These character pieces complement each other and Karg-Elert’s sometimes quirky take on old forms can be used to illustrate Carroll’s world of linguistic adventure.

Rise of the Machine

Edgard Varese - Density 21.5 reading from To a Racing Car (Marinetti)

     To many, Edgard Varese was a musical seer. 20 years before the advent of electronic music in the mainstream, Varese was already writing his Liberation of Sound, a treatise calling for the development of classical music through the embrace of technology and the panalopy of sounds and instruments (both acoustic and mechanical) that industrialization could support. Throughout his career, Varese pushed the boundaries of music and machine closer together, writing music for traditional instruments aimed to sound “electronic” and finally embracing tape recording technology in his Deserts. Density 21.5 preceded a dormant period in Varese’s compositional career but his work is a milestone for contemporary flute literature. Written for flutist Georges Barrere, this work celebrated the inauguration of a new flute made of platinum, which has a density of 21.5 g/cm3. This work is devoid of sentiment and is the antithesis of the French School which had dominated flute literature up to this point. Harsh and pointed, Density 21.5 explores the extremes of the flute, challenging the player to be more machine than musician.

     Although many of Varese’s philosophies regarding technology and art overlapped with futurist ideas, he strongly denied and even condemned the futurist movement, which was a product of Italy and Russia in the early 20th century. The growth of industrialization and the seeming triumph of man over nature led to a quick embrace of the new technology that was transforming the daily lives of formerly agriculturally-bound societies. Filipo Marinetti of Italy spearheaded this embrace of the new, dynamic machines in his Futurist Manifesto, a tract that called for the abandonment of the cliches of the past and the glorification of the science that brought speed, technology, and development to Italy. Written in 1908, To a Racing Car is more paean than poem. Marinetti extols the violence and speed of this new machine, that is “hungry” and has “eyes like a forge,” almost as if it were human.

Ambiguity in the Fog

Robert Dick - Afterlight reading from Fog (Amy Clampitt)

     Robert Dick is a kind of renaissance-man of the flute. Composer, improviser, instrument builder, and flutist all-in-one, he has been on the forefront of modern flute technique for 30 years and has published countless works that bridge the gap between rock music, world, and classical music. The main feature of Dick’s music is the incorporation of extended techniques. For the uninitiated, extended techniques require the flutist to manipulate the instrument in a nontraditional (in the context of the Western classical music) manner that produces non-traditional sounds. The flute goes from being a monophonic to a polyphonic instrument and the color palette available to both performers and composers is suddenly augmented. In Afterlight, Dick uses these techniques to produce an ambiguous, searching work that senses a center but never makes it there. Repetition of certain resonant harmonies are pillars of the work and their open sounds create a vague, shifting atmosphere where tonality and form remain uncertain in a wash of sound.

     Amy Clampitt spent many summers on the Maine coast with her companion, Harold Korn. The rugged Maine coastline, its lighthouses and fog are the basis and inspiration for many of her nature-oriented poems. Clampitt loved unfamiliar words and saw poetry as a form of music, as another way of manipulating sound to create meaning. Opacity, foghorns, open, O’Keefe; Clampitt used both assonance and alliteration to capture a certain sound and the essence of fog itself, just as Robert Dick utilizes his open polyphonic sounds in Afterlight. Unfamiliar words such as campanula are littered across this poem, just as Dick introduces unfamiliar sounds, to enhance the aural experience and create music from notes and words.

Sounds in Words 
Harold Metzler  - from Rumours, "Trapset" reading from The Bells (Poe)

     Boom! Crash! Woof-woof! As most people learned in high school English class, onomatopoeia is a writing device that directly translates sound into words. The very idea of this, when given too much thought, is actually somewhat ridiculous. What is a “cough?” Technically, it is a sudden and often repetitively occurring reflex which helps to clear the large breathing passages from secretions, irritants, foreign particles and microbes. In no way does this define sound. The limitations of language to explain aural phenomena are reached when we encounter the world of onomatopoeia.

     Music itself is sound and although tomes have been written about its history, craft, and production, it is difficult to truly encapsulate in words what music is without referring to another sound. Music, however, is often trying to emulate a natural (or unnatural sound) and in that quest, also faces a limited language. Prior to the 20th century, composers had to content themselves with tonality, rhythm, and instrument colors in order to create a storm wind or a bird. With the expanded techniques of the 20th century, composers have a larger variety of sounds to choose from. Woodwinds can become percussion instruments and percussion instruments string instruments and so on. This idea of creating a new sound that represents something else in musical technique is a type of musical onomatopoeia.

     A trapset is a drum-set often seen in jazz and rock bands. Snares drums, cymbals, and brushes and sticks create a variety of sounds heard in popular music. In this work for solo flute, the flute itself becomes a percussion instrument, never once uttering a note in the traditional form. The clicks, thumps, whooshes, and bangs of the drum-set and replicated through the flute, which is transformed into an onomatopoeic vessel for sounds outside of itself.

     The Bells, by Edgar Allen Poe, is one of the more well-known examples of onomatopoeia in poetry. Written when he was living in the Bronx near Fordham University, Poe captures the sounds and character of bells made of different metals for different occasions. Silver holiday bells “tinkle,” golden wedding bells “ring” and solemn iron bells “toll and groan.” Each descriptive word captures the bells’ sound and character, just as Metzler’s work conjures a jazz drum set and its inherent sounds.