The first concert of Market Square Concerts' Summermusic 2021 with the Jasper Quartet's program called "Reveal" is Wednesday night at 7:30 but it's not at the usual Market Square Church location (due to on-going renovations). Join us at St. Michael Lutheran Church on the first block of State Street between Front & 2nd Streets (parking is available on State Street and on the two small lots behind the church). And yes, this is a Live Concert open to the public: for tickets, see the website (they can also be purchased at the door).
We are committed to the safety of our audience, our musicians and our community, so we will continue to closely monitor CDC guidelines and will adjust our safety protocols in response to any changes. Presently, we respectfully ask those audience members who have not been vaccinated to wear a mask.
The previous post was about the first work on the program, the String Quartet in G Major by Florence Price, and you can read about her and her music (and hear a performance by the Jasper Quartet) here. This post is about the quartet Pisachi by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate and Maurice Ravel's more familiar Quartet in F Major.
Stay tuned (as they say in Radio Speak) for posts about two more Summermusic programs, with violinist Francisco Fullana's "Long Shadow of Bach" on Saturday and the Harlem Quartet's with works ranging from William Grant Still and Jessie Montgomery to Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis next Tuesday (both concerts also at 7:30).
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Though Florence Price's quartet may be an "early work" in terms of her output, despite her earlier education, she wrote it when she was 42 and finally beginning to take a career in composition seriously.
The next work on the Jasper Quartet program was written by a composer who was 45. Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate was born in 1968 – in fact, he will turn 53 on Sunday, July 25th – and is very much alive and active as a composer today.
If this is the first work of his you are hearing, there are a number of works you can explore to place him in his artistic context. After all, every time you hear a piece by Beethoven, whether you've never heard it before or not, there are several works of his you're likely familiar with to get an idea “who Beethoven is.” Imagine what it must be like to be a listener new to Classical Music who's hearing something for the first time we veterans of concerts might think “oh, that old thing again” (whether it's his 5th Symphony or the 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet) – frankly, as jaded as I can be at times, I admit to never being tired of hearing either.
So let's reveal the music of Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate: in this case, a piece for string quartet entitled “Pisachi” whose title translates as “Reveal.”
So let's get that out of the way
first. Despite my years of being a pronouncer on the radio, my tongue
still tends to seize up at the site of names or titles outside my
Language Comfort Zone. Perhaps yours does, too.
Impichchaachaaha'...
“It's like a triplet and two eighths,” he explains – IM-pich-cha – CHA-ha. This is his Chickasaw family “house name,” basically the equivalent of a European surname. It basically translates as “his raised corn-crib” and perhaps deriving a family name from it would be comparable to an Englishman in a medieval village being given the name of his profession, like Miller, Baker, or Smith: in a Chickasaw village, perhaps this was the man who built and maintained or tended the important corn-crib (a raised silo) built to protect the village's harvest vegetables from ground dampness and foraging rodents.
Now that we're past The Name, we can get to the core of it: the music that heritage inspired.
Jerod Tate (as he is usually referred to in conversation) was born in Norman, OK, and has earned degrees from Northwestern University in Evanston IL and the Cleveland Institute where he studied with Donald Erb. As a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, one of the indigenous tribes of North America, he has taken the advice handed out by Dvořák initially to his African-American students (and which Chadwick passed on to Florence Price) to explore the music of his ethnic heritage to find inspiration for his own natural musical voice.
In addition to his own Chickasaw roots, Tate has explored music from, as his website lists, twenty different tribes. Tate “is dedicated to the development of American Indian classical composition” and specifically in Pisachi for string quartet – the word in the Chickasaw language means “reveal” – “to honor his Southwest Indian cousins through classical repertoire” by using dance music from the Hopi and Pueblo tribes.
Here is a performance of Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate's Pisachi by the Jasper Quartet, part of a concert video recorded earlier this year.
(After 16:13, the program continues with Beethoven's C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op.131.)
As the composer explains in this interview (beginning at 0:58), there is a lot to consider with the question “What is Indian music?” but ultimately, he says, “my goal is a very personal goal... to tell you how I feel about being Indian.”
Listening to this work's six sections (movements, perhaps; he calls them “epitomes,” not to be confused with the standard pronunciation; he rhymes it with “tomes” as in “books”), you, if you're unfamiliar with its sources and initial inspirations, might think of it as a largely abstract work, however atmospheric or vibrant it may be, going beyond the merely picturesque. “You can keep things very very simple and transcription-like,” he explains in that interview, “and then you can make things incredibly abstracted and complex.”
While it may go back to the composer's own “musical roots,” think of it the way Bartók did when he went from transcribing previously overshadowed Hungarian folk songs (not “gypsy” melodies) to eventually crafting original musical material based on those folk songs' different characteristics to create his music, specifically the string quartets, absorbing them into his natural voice.
Originally composed in 2013 for the quartet known as ETHEL, Pisachi was intended to accompany a slide show of Southwestern images by Native-American artists (you can view the slide-show as part of the video recorded by ETHEL, here).
For anyone interested in extra credit, at the end of this post I'll include some “context” to this weaving of Native-American voices into what makes up this fabric of what we call American Music, but let's continue now with the String Quartet of Maurice Ravel.
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By comparison, there's not likely to be many listeners in the audience who aren't familiar with at least some of the music by Maurice Ravel, one of the leading composers of the early-20th Century, even if it's just his Bolero (and speaking of “cultural appropriation,” what does a Spaniard think of that old saying trotted out about “the best Spanish music was written by French composers”??).
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| Maurice Ravel, around 1901 |
Here's the Jasper Quartet in a concert video recorded earlier this year: while it begins with Jessie Montgomery's “Strum” (we'll come back to this for next week's concert with the Harlem Quartet) and includes Reinaldo Moya's “Chapter One,” which you're certainly welcome to check out, the program concluded with the Ravel Quartet in F Major which is where I've begun the video-link.
As Lucy Miller Murray describes it in her program notes, “The first movement opens with a rich melody shared by the four instruments and then handed to the first violin over rapid figures by the second violin and viola. An exciting tonal effect occurs when the violin and viola play two octaves apart. In the second movement, Ravel’s love of the exotic reveals itself in the suggestion of a Javanese gamelan orchestra. The rhapsodic third movement includes a reference to the opening melody, thus preserving form but always in lustrous and ever-changing colors. Stemming from a five-beat meter, the restlessness of the last movement is ended by a return to the first movement theme. Structure is not all, however, since the ravishing melodies and tonal colors remind us that this work is indeed“emotional first and intellectual second.”
Of course, there are many ways of listening to a piece of music, whether it's new to you or an old friend. One is simply letting it wash over you in pure enjoyment of the moment; another is, after finding out a little bit more about the music and its composer, you let it “wash over you” but with a context in which you can better enjoy it. Or you can listen analytically to the music on a basic level – what instrument is playing in the foreground here; what is that instrument in the background doing; I've heard this theme before but how is it different, now? – or on a more complex level, and that complexity increases with your level of musical background: certainly a music-lover will listen to it differently (with different interests) than a violinist (listening for the interpretive nuances) or the composer (listening for technical details of harmony, structure, use of the instruments).
And while some technical discussions may cause a music-lover's eyes to glaze over (or their brains to freeze), sometimes simple questions involve complex answers and, as anyone who knows me, one thing leads to another and, though you may “understand” (well, let's say “comprehend”) the music a little better, until you realize there really is, most often, no real answer. On the other hand, that's the great thing about Art: intellectual or emotional, there's always more to come back to.
This program brings to mind the age-old question (and one I've been asked by student composers constantly) about “How a Composer Finds His or Her Voice?” And we find it answered in a more obvious ways through Florence Price being an African-American (her quartet indicates the dichotomy of a Western European Training with the experience of being an African-American) and Jerod Tate absorbing the music and culture of his Native-American heritage.
But how is that question answered by Maurice Ravel? He's French, making him a White European, not that all White Europeans sound alike. What, if anything, makes his music “French”?
So let's consider, “What Makes an American Composer 'American'?” Is it (like Copland) the use of American folk songs (like his Appalachian Spring) or (like Bernstein) in his use of American Jazz? But what about “American Voices” when Copland writes his Symphony No. 3 or Bernstein his “Kaddish Symphony”? Is it “American Music” simply because, well... it's written by a composer who is American-born? Is Elliott Carter, no doubt the Poster Child for Complex Music (insert long digression, here), still an American composer despite not being influenced by folk music or jazz (though, actually, he was)?
In Ravel's case, there's the
centuries old dichotomy of “German vs French” in Western
European culture, not just music (insert even longer digression,
here!). Pardon the analogy, but if you wanted to know the difference
between a Victorian steam engine and Japan's “Bullet Train,” you could be
handed a pile of engineering texts to explain how they're designed, what kind of technologies go into the engines, and so forth; but perhaps you'll be satisfied with “one goes faster than the other.” It depends on how much you want to know.
Ravel in 1930
Let's skim the surface of just “harmony” alone.
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, “a chord is a chord is a chord” until it does something and moves to another chord: then it becomes harmony. A dissonance is more than “an ugly sound” – it's a note added to a chord that doesn't belong to that chord originally but now creates an "active" chord that needs to resolve to another chord. By adding an F to a G Major Chord, you now have what in the German harmonic tradition is a G7 Chord or, in C Major, a Dominant 7th, where that F requires the chord to resolve to an E, and most logically (but not exclusively) to the 3rd of a C Major chord, a V-I progression (read “five-one”), dominant to tonic. This is the whole foundation for what we have for centuries called “Tonality.”
Consequently you can add other tones to that G Chord – for instance, an A, the interval of a 9th above the root G, and it becomes a “9th Chord.” In German (or Germanic) Music, this too would need to resolve. And the whole thrust of Music Theory Training is figuring how to move from one chord to another (why they're called “Harmony Classes,” not “Chord Classes”).
But in France, the French being who they are – and much of that seems to be “to be the opposite of whatever Germans are” – those added notes, the 7th and the 9th, don't need to resolve: they just are. And suddenly you have a whole bunch of chords that can move without specific pitches needing to move to other specific pitches. They're no longer "active chords," just static moments of sound. They can move, for instance, in parallel formation, and it is this which most often is describes as the musical equivalent of a painter's “Impressionism,” that blurring or complete obliteration of the lines that so changed how painters (and those who look at their paintings) can see the world.
Suddenly, a 9th Chord is not one chord in a specific harmonic progression: it becomes a point of color that sounds more complex than a simple G Major triad with more shades and tints and tones and reverberations than a simple color, the difference between, perhaps, blue and turquoise or aquamarine.
Now, you can listen to this next video before or after you hear Wednesday night's concert, or you may say, “okay, I don't have time for all of this” – if you think my pre-concert talks are convoluted, listen to how Bruce Adolphe gets into it – listen at least to some of the opening. Even the background about Ravel's troubles with the Paris Conservatoire is “worth the listen.”
He may spend the first 40 minutes talking about the first 30 seconds of music, but if you bear with it, you're well on your way to the Bullet Train.
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Jerod Tate is not the first American artist to be inspired by Indian Culture.
This goes back long before the European concept of “The Noble Savage” inspired Longfellow to write Hiawatha in the 1850s. And while there was a concerted effort to suppress the Native culture officially even before 1776, the viewpoints of the different characters in James Fenimore Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, written between 1823 and 1841, often reflect the opposing attitudes of the American public. On the one hand, how do we deal with this cultural oppression at the same time we see, especially in the early-20th Century, an attempt to embrace the culture and make it part of the American fabric, another element of this broad American landscape, from Sea to Shining Sea?
In this interview with Frank Oteri of NewMusic USA, Jerod Tate explains his musical and cultural backgrounds – and I recommend the whole interview if you have the time – but I specifically want to point out this passage in which he talks about his awareness as an Indian and an Indian Composer and his discovering (after he began composing) those earlier composers who were called “Indianist” Composers, and why the distinction is important.
Without getting into the whole “cultural appropriation” rabbit-hole, here, I present this merely for context in talking about the use of “Native-American Music” within a Western Classical tradition.
There was a whole “school” of American composers who became fascinated by the music of the Native-American or Indian cultures. They were called “Indianists” and they were White Men who, in some cases, transcribed Indian melodies and rhythms and at other times used this material as “local color” to create music that sounded Indian.
The difference between what Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is composing, exploring his own cultural roots to express “what it is to be an Indian,” is different from a White Man dressing up in an Indian-sounding musical style. It is, in one sense, the common perception of those Indian stereotypes of beating tom-toms and simple, single-voiced chants is no different that the way Indian characters in the old TV and movie westerns are portrayed (and usually played by White actors in make-up). It is, in the current sense of “Critical Race Theory,” looking behind taking Native-American children and teaching them “European” ways to obliterate their heritage, their language and culture (much as the English did with Welsh and Irish children). We look on it differently now than our ancestors did, but the scars remain; and the question, what do we do with the art that was created then, is a very real one, whether it involves removing Civil War monuments or showing a program like “The Lone Ranger.”
In that sense, here's a bit of context about Native-American-inspired music from the past century.
Very often, they were ignorant of certain details in terms of this attempted authenticity: let's say a non-European composer writes an opera about Europeans where, though set in, say, Italy, different characters have Polish, Norwegian and Bulgarian names; and that the story mixes up details that are French, Irish, and Russian. Those of us of European heritage would dismiss it as “ridiculous” and “ignorant,” yet that's exactly what many Indianist composers did, mixing elements from different tribes to create a One-Sound-Fits-All musical representation of a generic Indian Culture.
Consider, for instance, Preston Ware Orem, a native Philadelphian. His most famous work
is his “American Indian Rhapsody” of 1918 with its Lisztian approach which, to a Native-American, would
sound no more like “Indian Folk Music” than Liszt's Hungarian
Rhapsodies, based not on folk music but “Gypsy” melodies, would
sound like Hungarian folk music to a native-born Hungarian (music the world began
to discover through the work of Bartók and Kodály decades later). As someone described it, it has the "costume" of Indian music but its soul.
Arthur Farwell, a Minnesota-born composer, was less interested in “what sounded Indian” than in gathering and transcribing authentic material, like this Navajo War Dance No. 2 (Op. 29) from 1908. There was the argument, when this music was new and fresh, that Americans were finally embracing these repressed cultures even if many more conservative concertgoers rebelled at the idea of listening to music not because it was by White Men inspired by African-American or Native-American dances, but because music of “these races” (so they argued) did not belong in the concert hall. The same thing had been said when Mikhail Glinka quoted some well known Russian folk songs in his opera, A Life for the Tsar in 1836, and several aristocrats in the audience protested, wondering why they were listening to things their coachmen would have danced to rather than those beautiful, refined dances they and their likewise culturally superior compatriots were familiar with?
Rabbit-holes and cans of worms aside, a website I found examined the story of Winona, now considered a “racist opera,” written in the late-1910s by Italian-born conductor, Alberto Bimboni, and eventually premiered in Oregon in 1926, two years later given an epic production in Minnesota. While the composer tried to arrange its premiere, it was championed by no less than President Warren G. Harding. Bimboni, who never wrote much else, was subsequently awarded for his work in promoting American opera, perhaps mostly as a conductor and producer. (As a teacher at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia in the '30s, Bimboni may have gained more lasting fame as an influence on a newly arrived young Italian student named Gian-Carlo Menotti.)
“While music of this 'Indianist movement' was very publicly marketed as having Native origins [and to bring awareness of the culture into Mainstream America], it was often presented with little-to-no context about the indigenous societies from which its influences sprang, or about the sacred or secular meaning it might have had for them...
“In modern context, this story’s legacy remains unsettled. Choctaw ethnomusicologist Tara Browner critiques Indianist composers for treating Native culture as a naked raw material, though she says that [Arthur] Farwell was less guilty of this than most. Music critic Joe Horowitz sympathetically branded Farwell 'America's Forbidden Composer' whose genuine musical genius is forever stained by the genre. Cherokee pianist Lisa Cheryl Thomas says she loves performing Indianist work, especially Farwell’s, because it connects her with her ancestors’ music. Perhaps most significantly, some Native communities are using [ethnomusicologist Frances] Densmore’s work [from the early 20th Century which “preserved Native cultural activities that would have otherwise been lost”] to reclaim and relearn their sacred songs and rituals in the 21st Century.” (from the Twin Cities PBS “Originals” website, “Discover the Origins of Minnesota's Own Grand Racist Opera”)
– Dick Strawser
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