CLINT MCCALLUM (b. 1980)
in a hall of mirrors waiting to die (2008)

All tonight’s pieces push at boundaries, preferring twilight zones, which composers may approach from different directions. With Clint McCallum’s music, you might get the feeling that the classical elegance is the subversive element, on a heavy bass of punk, jazz, and metal. Tonight’s piece is unusual for him in having no electronics, though it still manages to come up with some extreme sounds: multiphonics (complex chords) on the sax, and noises at the bottom of the piano created by placing a chain on a piece of tinfoil, held down by a book, across the lowest eight strings—not to mention the intense high register from which the sax can yell and keep on yelling, the player maintaining the sound by circular breathing. The piece was written for tonight’s performers, who chose it to open their album Intersections, on the Spektral label. Its title, the composer notes on the score, “has just as much to do with the final scene of Enter the Dragon as it does with the different musical metaphors that come and go throughout the piece. I chose it because it evokes both a sense of being trapped in a spaceless space and a feeling of confused/frustrated/apathetic urgency.”

ANTON WEBERN (1883-1945)
Quartet, Op. 22 (1928-30)

I. Sehr mässig
II. Sehr schwungvoll

A lot of music has to do with reconciling differences, but here someone seems to be trying to start an argument among people determined to agree with one another. In the work he wrote just before this quartet, his single symphony, Webern discovered how Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method could generate textures in which instrumental lines are forever concurring, not just at the level of theme or line, as in earlier polyphonic music, but interval by interval. Here he takes that principle further. Except for the piano, which is relatively voluble in its efforts to bind the ensemble together, the instruments express themselves in gestures of two, three or four notes, in a constant dance of relation and reciprocity, playing on through two movements that last about three and a half minutes each.

It took Webern nearly two years to achieve this tiny opus, partly because he began, in September 1928, with the idea of writing a concerto for four soloists—piano, violin, clarinet, and horn—accompanied by strings. Not until the following summer did he settle on the definitive instrumentation, with a tenor saxophone replacing the horn and no accompaniment, the concerto becoming a quartet. Still more than a year passed before he finished the piece, partly because he was busy with conducting engagements, partly because he was diverted by other creative projects. The première took place in the small hall at the Musikverein in Vienna on April 13, 1931, at the end of the first concert devoted solely to his music.

Following a five-measure introduction, the first movement has its theme played twice over by the sax, with other instruments around, while the second movement has the alternating form of a rondo or scherzo. In both movements, though, the larger shape is paradoxically obscured by the incessant pattern-making that sustains it, to the extent that the music can easily seem an abstract construct. Webern, however, was thinking of flowers and mineral crystals, and of a tenderness one can feel, for example, in the beautiful harmonies from clarinet and sax in the second movement.

MILTON BABBITT (b. 1916)
All Set (1957)

Where Webern’s saxophone is just a toe in the water of jazz, Babbitt dives right in—indeed, comes near persuading us he was never out. Certain features of his style, especially the bouncing repeated notes and the rhythms nervily jumping strong beats, feel right at home in this piece for modern-jazz combo: a pair of saxophones, trumpet and trombone, piano and vibes, bass and percussion.

The title, as often with Babbitt, is a pun, its more esoteric allusion being to the kind of twelve-tone row he prefers, which he terms an “all-combinatorial set.” Combinatoriality has to do with how different row forms fit together to keep all twelve pitches in constant play; an all-combinatorial set is one whose first six pitches can be combined with the first six of an inverted form with no duplications (“all-combinatorial” because any set will have a retrograde form of which this is true). For example, Babbitt’s set in this piece is C–E–F–B–F###-Bb–G–Eb–Db–D–A–Ab, and the relevant inversion is the one on G: G–Eb–D–Ab–Db–A–C–E–F#–F–Bb–B, whose first six notes complete the chromatic total when added to the first six of the original form. Also noteworthy, and significant for the bluesy feel of the piece, is how the first two notes of each of these rows together produce a triad with major and minor thirds: C–Eb–E–G.

Playing for not much longer than the Webern quartet, through a sequence of compact solos and choruses, All Set is probably unique in being thoroughly consistent, idiomatic and sophisticated both as twelve-tone composition and as jazz.

MICHAEL PISARO (b. 1961)
The Collection (1999-2000)

Time pools. It is as if these pieces were always there, just needing to be lifted, only a little, out of their silence.

There are twenty-five of them.

Few instructions are offered or required: no more than a sentence or two for each piece, with maybe a scrap of musical notation.

An example: “Divide a duration of any length into a number of parts of equal length and alternate sound and silence, the process carried out independently by the two players. A sustained, soft sound on any pitch or noise.” (2 for two musicians)

Twenty-four of the pieces are for one or two musicians, the exception being a tuning study for orchestra or ensemble.

They may be performed singly or in groups, and if the latter, separated or overlapping, the pieces perhaps appearing twice over during the course of the performance.

LUCIANO CHESSA (b. 1971)
Variazioni su un oggetto di scena (2002/2005/2007)

Var. XXII (Valsugana)
Var. XI (Maridemi mi)
Var. I (Reposare)

The boundaries around which Luciano Chessa is moving are partly those we draw between child and adult, innocence and experience, toy and tool—as well as those between music and theater, art and play. Each variation uses a different oggetto di scena (prop), with musical as well as dramatic consequences, affecting both sound and feeling. In a context of absurdity, tenderness squeezes itself out.

Each variation is, too, based on a different Italian folksong, the three being, Chessa has said, “memories from different times”: “Valsugana is an Alpine song my father used to sing. Non potho reposare is a Sardinian song my grandmother would sing to me (I am Sardinian), and Maridemi mi is a Piedmontese ballata that Roberto Leydi, my ethnomusicology professor at the University of Bologna would sing in class, then play Teresa Viarengo’s moving (and only) recording.”

The composer has also provided the following note, together with an epigraph from the Mexican musician Mercedes Gómez Benet:

‘To give life to objects and make them perform, this is the most primary childhood game.’

Premiered at Gregory Moore’s Maybeck Studio in Berkeley, Variazioni su un oggetto di scena is a set of three noncontiguous variations presented in reverse order, without their theme. This setting implies the existence of an ideal (original?) form of the piece other than the one that is presently offered as its substitute, a form that can to a degree be imagined, mentally reconstructed with some effort on the part of the listener. So the first shall be last, at least.

LUCIANO CHESSA (b. 1971)
Louganis (2007)

In 1988, watching daytime events at the Seoul Olympics unfold live on television in Italy at dead of night, the teenage Chessa was astonished by one supreme athlete: Greg Louganis. Nearly two decades later he created this homage, drawing on his memories and on a passage in the diver’s memoir Breaking the Surface:

I stretch my body towards the water. I feel the water rushing through my body and then…silence. It’s a peace that only divers know.

This gives subject and shape both to the video work (by Terry Berlier) that is part of the show and to the performance, by Chessa himself, wearing bells and operating on a grand piano whose strings are being activated by twenty-seven electric toothbrushes. The sound strikingly represents that of aerated water coursing past all around the listener, gradually being overcome by silence. At the same time, the performance allows Chessa—and us—access back to the living room of adolescence, where claustrophobic mundanity was lit by the small-screen images of distant gods.

Re-enactment—touching (touching also in being necessarily deficient, reporting on loss)—becomes ritual.

To end again with the composer’s own words:

Diving is all in the water. It is all in how gently you break its surface.

Reacting with inexorable precision to the smallest stimulus, water echoes sounds, motions, emotions, stories. It records the energy of a masterfully executed movement, the divine of diving, the glory of a body in motion.

Diving, more than any other sport, presents us with a splendid allegory of a life cycle.

Success and failure: everything burns up in an arc of rise and fall.

Diving is about the most beautiful thing a human being can do.

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.