Soundscape with Maria Bachmann & Jon Klibonoff

Last night was a special night in the musical life of Harrisburg with the world premiere of a new work by a world-renowned composer. I’ll get to Philip Glass’s Violin Sonata - and the rest of the performance by Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff – in the next post. This one is about one of the educational outreach programs Market Square Concerts calls “Soundscapes,” made possible with support from the Foundation for Enhancing Communities.

On Friday afternoon, I dropped in on the Soundscape event at Whitaker Center with Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff talking and playing for about a hundred students from the Capital Area School for the Arts, the Nativity School and the Harrisburg Academy.

When I got there a few minutes late, having underestimated the time it would take finding a parkable place in the garage, Maria had just begun talking about some of the “special effects” available on the violin – pizzicato, plucking the strings in different ways, and strumming chords on it kind of like a guitar or ukelele. Then she and Jon played the second movement of Maurice Ravel’s Violin Sonata, the famous “Blues” which must’ve sounded pretty funky in 1927 when French composers were just becoming fascinated by American jazz.

They each talked about how they “discovered” music. For Maria, growing up in Philadelphia, she started playing at the family piano (her father was a pianist) and so they started her on lessons when she was about four years old. Not long after that, she discovered her grandfather’s violin in the basement and thought it must be like a guitar, so she started strumming at it like that (cool, after hearing her play the ukelele-like blues movement by Ravel) - then her father showed her the right way to hold it and suggested if she liked it, she could take lessons on the violin, too. Eventually she found she liked the violin better than the piano and dropped the piano lessons.

Jon had a similar story, with musician parents who had a piano in the house, also. His kindergarten teacher played the piano and accompanied the class when they’d sing little songs. Jon would go home and try plunking the songs out on the family piano. When he started adding harmony to the tunes, they decided perhaps the kid should start taking lessons. Later, he went on to the Manhattan School of Music where he now teaches. He’s a busy pianist and teacher, loves to play chamber music and is part of the piano trio, Trio Solisti, along with Maria and cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach who’d be familiar to Harrisburg audiences as a member of Concertante, by the way.

Maria wouldn’t admit to how many years ago she and Jon met and started playing together (“it’d be too embarrassing”) but she told the story how Jon was accompanying her boyfriend who was also a violinist. So they started playing together regularly. When she and the boyfriend broke up, she kept the pianist ;-) and they’ve been making music together ever since.

After they played the last two movements of the Brahms sonata on their program – a light, lyrical intermezzo and then the dramatic, driven finale – she mentioned that sometimes people ask her why she moves around so much. It’s almost impossible for her not to move when playing music like this – she mentioned how rock-stars move on stage when they’re playing and she feels “this is my rock music – ‘cause we think it ROCKS!” And the kids applauded in agreement.

(Incidentally, it was cool to hear a friend in the audience say after the recital that this was a great concert to watch as well as listen to. She’s an engaging performer to see - very expressive, often smiling and clearly enjoying what she’s playing and who she’s playing it for.)

And then they talked about the work that was commissioned for them to perform for Market Square Concerts, a world premiere right here in Harrisburg PA. You can read more about Philip Glass’s Violin Sonata in my previous post here.

It’s hardly an exaggeration when Jon said he went to Glass’ website and saw that on almost every day of the year, a work by Philip Glass is being performed somewhere in the world. True, there were eight days in February that nothing’s listed on the calendar (March, by comparison, looks like a slow month, only half-full), but then consider that on February 27th, his Violin Concerto was being performed in Novosibirsk, Russia, his 2nd String Quartet was being performed in Worcestershire, England, that Glass himself was performing his Songs Based on Poems of Leonard Cohen in southern California, and that his music “The Light” was being danced to in New York City as part of a six-day run. He was playing opposite himself on Saturday: his performance at Claremont CA meant he couldn’t be in Harrisburg for his latest world premiere. But he did send an e-mail to be read to the audience before the concert, and I’ll post that later, as well.

They talked about the whole process of working with a composer who’d been asked to write a piece for them to play, how they familiarized themselves with other works of his – Jon was working on the piano pieces adapted from the Oscar-nominated film score for “The Hours” – how they played different things for Glass so he could familiarize himself with how they played. Then they went back and played the piece for him as he was working on it to get each other’s reactions and suggestions. After all, there were no other performances to rely on or recordings to listen to. But they did have a living, breathing composer to talk to, something they couldn’t do with Ravel or Brahms.

Maria said there was a lot of give-and-take in the process. Many of the technical suggestions she made about the solo violin part ended up in the final score. But she was kind of reluctant to make one suggestion to the composer: after all, he is Philip Glass.

The whole first movement is in G Minor but the final chord of the movement is a G Major chord and she felt it didn’t sound... well, quite right. He asked to hear it played with a G Minor chord instead and then had them play the whole movement both ways. In the end, he decided to change the last chord to a G Minor chord.

Not a big deal, you think? I was sitting there wondering what Brahms would have told her if she’d said “You know, Dr. Brahms, that D Major chord at the end of the first movement of your D Minor Violin Sonata...” Hmmm... But of course, Brahms is dead, so we’ll never know.

(After hearing both of these sonatas played back-to-back, I have to admit they’re two very different situations: the voicing in the Brahms didn’t make for the sharp unexpected contrast she felt from Glass’s final chord and couldn’t be changed. I felt the change in the Glass didn’t ruffle the mood which the major chord might have done.)

Then they played the third movement. After the final wisp evaporated at the end, the audience applauded and then applauded again when Jon mentioned, by the way, “you were the very first people to hear this music” – they’d never played it for anyone else except the composer. I was sitting behind Lucy Miller Murray – the piece was commissioned by her husband Martin Murray as a 70th birthday present for her – and they hadn’t even heard this movement yet, only the 1st movement!

Then the kids had a chance to ask a number of questions, ranging from practicing to her 1782 Gagliano violin. Then they played an encore – Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” – before being whisked off to WITF for a live broadcast that afternoon.

On the drive out, they both told Ellen Hughes what a wonderful audience the kids were – attentive all the way through the hour (plus a few more minutes) and asking really intelligent, insightful questions. It was a very positive experience for both of them and, apparently, judging from the students’ response as they were leaving (see very dark photo, left), positive for them, too.

Earlier in the week, Truman Bullard did another part of this “Soundscape” presentation, talking on Monday to the students at Capital Area School for the Arts and on Thursday to students at the Nativity School. He gave them some background on the violin, had a violinist with him who demonstrated different playing techniques on the instrument, using Paganini’s famous 24th Caprice as an example. In addition to the changing role of the pianist in sonata collaborations – going from simple supportive accompanying to the true equal-partnership that you’ll hear in the Brahms sonatas – Truman talked about the different types of music which we normally describe as “Classical” or “Romantic” – how the first is more technical and abstract, the second more emotional and freer than the other – even showing them two different paintings of Paganini, the one by Ingres more classical, objective and realistic and the other, by Delacroix, with its darkness and more vague, subjective depiction of the violinist, more Romantic, though they’re both of the same man: you could play his music either way and still be playing the same piece though it might sound different.

It is easy for people to complain how little good arts education there is in the public schools today, given the economy and the budgets or, even before that, of the “either/or attitude” that prefers science/math and sports over the arts rather than finding a way to include them all in the curriculum. This doesn’t mean it’s absent from the schools today, but considerably lessened from what it was when I was a student and quite possibly from when you were a student.

So when an arts organization like Market Square Concerts sends someone out to the schools to talk about an up-coming concert or brings the students in to hear the artists who’ll be performing those concerts in a day or two, it’s not about selling tickets. It is, in a very real sense of the word, “long-range planning” and “investing in the future,” not to mention “improving the community.” Market Square Concerts is committed to continuing their Soundscapes next season. You can support it, too, by contacting them to make a contribution.

-- Dr. Dick

Soundscapes

One of the most important things an arts organization can do, beyond presenting the best quality art it can to its community, is to connect with young people to introduce them to the arts and hopefully build a future audience. Today’s students will not only have a more enriched life as a result, they will also be the potential audience and contributors for the arts years into the future.

Over twenty years ago when I was involved in a Harrisburg Symphony “Tiny Tots” concert and practically everybody in the room was like three feet tall and sprawled all over the floor, I remember one of the older adults with the group of first graders talking about growing up in one of Pennsylvania’s coal towns during the depression. His introduction to classical music had a touch of magic about it. His teacher had brought in some records and a record-player – not something many of the families would’ve had in their living rooms, probably – and he remembered sitting there, absolutely transfixed by hearing the sound of a full orchestra coming out of this box. Ever since, he’s been a life-long lover of classical music. He wondered, looking around at these first-graders, whether hearing 25 members of an orchestra playing live in front of them could even approach that sense of magic he’d felt so long ago, considering how much “experience” there is for today’s kids, between TV, movies and videos (one could add computer games, now) and all the other sounds and sights that stimulate and assault us every day. How can you make a difference, any more?

One of the projects Market Square Concerts has implemented recently is a program called “Soundscapes” which takes classical music to the students, live presentations tied into an up-coming concert that work in two parts.

I had the opportunity to do one for January’s concert with pianist Matthew Bengtson, talking to the students of the Capital Area School for the Arts about Bach’s Goldberg Variations and a few of the contemporary pieces on the first half of the program. That was Part 1.

Part 2, then, was taking the students over to Whitaker Center to hear the pianist himself talk about what he was going to play and then to play a little for them. In this particular instance, he also had a guest with him, one of the composer’s on the program, Jeremy Gill, who talked about his own piece of music and then Bengtson played it for the students.

Passes and discount tickets are made available to the students and their parents to attend the concert so in effect it becomes a three-part opportunity. In this way, students may become introduced to music they might never hear otherwise.

The students at CASA are already on the path to becoming artists – dancers, actors, painters, film-makers as well as musicians. Still, the opportunity to hear live classical music is not always easily available to them. It may inspire them, reinforce their own sense of direction, perhaps even impact their own sense of artistic values by giving them something that those of us on the outside might only guess at. But otherwise, it’s possible they might never find out about it.

There were about 70 students from CASA there on Inauguration Day when I spoke to them in the sanctuary of old Salem Church where the school meets in rooms spread out across the building. My session was done in two parts – a more general introduction for all the students, perhaps tying things in with different arts and their viewpoints; then a more specific one geared toward the music students. We had thought perhaps 20 minutes or so would be a good length for each half, but the students seemed so attentive, I lost track of the time. The whole presentation went past the hour mark but they didn’t seem to notice the time. I certainly didn’t.

The second part was held on Friday, before the concert, on stage at Whitaker Center. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this one, but Ellen Hughes told me afterward it was “very cool” with 122 students in all. In addition to the CASA students, there were 40 from St. Stephens and 9 from the Nativity School, all very attentive. “You could see their attention increasing as the presentation continued” during the course of an hour, the same thing I’d noticed at my presentation a few days earlier.

Matt went into more detail about how the three etudes by György Ligeti are “put together,” the way the composer combines pitches into non-traditional chords or creates layers of sound that, in effect, move in independent tempos and create a different kind of texture than we’re used to in the standard-operating-procedures of classical music.

Jeremy was about 20 minutes late, unfortunately – the result of an accident that tied up traffic on the Schuylkill Express, coming up from Philadelphia – but he and the performer talked not only about the music but about the rare opportunity a performer has when working with a living composer, asking questions that you can’t ask Bach who’s been dead for almost 260 years.

Matt said he doesn’t want too much information, though, because it limits some of his own interpretation. Very often, what a composer will do – unless the performer is just so far off the mark – is make suggestions or comment about the vaguer details if, perhaps, the mood isn’t quite what he had in mind, perhaps bringing something more into focus that the performer might not have considered.

Recently, I heard Elliott Carter, one of the other composers on this program, discussing his music with some performers. As complex as his music is, he doesn’t seem to bother much about how exact they are – the right notes, the right rhythms. He’s more concerned about the shape of the line and the proportion of this tempo to that tempo, for instance, rather than stating “that’s too fast” or too slow. He allows the performer to bring his or her own interpretation to the piece and only made reference to things that would augment what they were doing with the notes he had written down on paper.

For many people, it’s always a mystery how somebody writes something down and then someone else can look at that, learn to play it and turn it into something you can sit back and listen to. Another mystery is how that same piece of music can be brought to life in so many different ways. De-mystifying that helps make it more accessible to new listeners, making them more comfortable with what’s happening around them.

With any luck, it will be a positive experience that will make it easier for them to enjoy a concert, whether it’s this one or a later one – or even one a few years from now. Such an opportunity is like planting seeds in a garden: some of them will take root now, some maybe later, maybe others not at all. It’s a big gamble, in a way, if you’re looking at today’s bottom line, to hope for a return on this investment of time (and money) at some point in the future. But to ignore it is only going to ensure that classical music will be heard by smaller and smaller audiences in years to come.

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The next program with Market Square Concerts will feature violinist Maria Bachmann and pianist Jon Klibonoff and there is another “Soundscape” presentation for this performance as well. This time, Truman Bullard, professor emeritus of music at Dickinson College, will return to CASA to talk about the music they’ll have a chance to hear live. He had done the first “Soundscape” of the season last November when Antares came to town with a performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time: Truman did the introductory presentation, giving them the back-story on Messiaen’s war-time work, a piece composed and premiered in a prisoner-of-war camp in World War II – and then a few days later, the students had a chance to hear the four musicians of Antares describe and play excerpts from the work.

One of the special things about this next program – Saturday, February 28th, which I’ll be blogging about in a few days or so – is the world premiere of a brand new Violin Sonata written by one of the leading composers in the world today, Philip Glass. That’s right, a world premiere by a major composer right here in Harrisburg!

And our students will get a chance to experience this in a more personal, behind-the-scenes kind of way when the performers offer their part of the Soundscape the day before the concert, something that can only enhance the experience of hearing it live in concert.

- Dr. Dick

Soundscape at CASA: Piano Music of Carter, Ligeti and Bach

On Tuesday, I spoke to a number of students at the Capital Area School for the Arts which meets at the Salem Church on Chestnut Street in Harrisburg. The cornerstone says it was built in 1821, only about 60 years after Johann Sebastian Bach published the Goldberg Variations, one of the works on the Market Square Concerts program this weekend.

This presentation was part one of Market Square Concerts’ latest “SOUNDSCAPE,” a cool thing that introduces the students to some of the music on the concert program and then, a day or two before the concert, they get to hear the artists talk about and play some of the music live just for them.

Truman Bullard had done one of these before the Antares Concert in November, introducing the students to Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” Then a few days later, the members of Antares played excerpts from the work and gave them the performers’ perspective on the piece. Many of the students then attended the concert Saturday night at Market Square Church. Truman will be back to do another one in February, prior to Maria Bachmann’s recital which will feature the world premiere of a violin sonata by Philip Glass.

Yesterday, there were close to 70 students from the different programs at the school with theater, visual arts, film and video, dance as well as music students. I took a couple of photos before we got started but I was looking right into brightly back-lit stained glass so all you can see are a couple of silhouettes in what would appear to be windows. Wasn’t sure I could pass them off as artsy or just examples of bad photography, so I decided not to post them...

On Friday, then, they’ll go over to Whitaker Center to hear pianist Matthew Bengtson and composer Jeremy Gill who will talk about the music for this concert, including Gill’s “Eliot Fragments.” Gill, a Harrisburg native, now teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and will have his Symphony No. 1 played by the Harrisburg Symphony in May.

Though Bach’s Goldberg Variations are clearly the “major work” for this concert, I began my share of the program by talking about some of the composers on the first half of the program.

Sometimes, young artists discover their dreams need to have a back-up plan in case the dream doesn't come true. Alexander Skryabin, still a conservatory student, was studying to become a concert pianist when an injury to his left hand looked like it was going to mean curtains for his career. Influenced by this dreadful realization, he concluded his first piano sonata which he was composing at the time – thinking he’d be, like most concert pianists of the day a pianist who also composed – with a funeral march (incidentally, pre-dating Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique by a year). Fortunately for him, he recovered and went on to become one of three major concert pianists in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century, along with Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. Unfortunately for us, it meant he wrote less than he might have, but still, for him, he was following both Plan A and Plan B.

Luciano Berio - two of his piano works are also on this program - had been drafted into the Italian army during World War II. On his very first day of training, being shown how to fire a rifle, he injured his hand. I’m not sure what this did for his military service, but in his case, it meant his dream of becoming a concert pianist was shelved: instead, he turned to composition, becoming one of the leading Italian composers of the 20th Century.

Elliott Carter, who celebrated his 100th Birthday last month, had been involved in music lessons but was rather vague about what he wanted to do about them. His parents were not keen on his becoming a musician. He was 15 when he heard the first American performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, fascinated as much by the music as he was by watching people troop out of the hall. Anything that could create that strong a response in people, he decided, was something he wanted to be a part of: even though he came late to identifying his own musical voice (he was in his 40s when this finally happened), he spent much of his life writing music that caused lots of people to troop out of the hall. More recently, his music has elicited cheers and standing ovations so he joked about perhaps having gone wrong, somewhere, after all these years.

I told the students how I had heard all five of Carter’s challenging string quartets in a single performance a year ago and how inspiring it was to see the auditorium filled with people there to hear this difficult music and who clearly loved it. It also inspired me that you must also have the conviction of your own integrity to realize your dreams, not to give in when people tell you “you know, it’d be much easier if you wrote in a style that would be easier to listen to.”

In his music, Carter explores different ways of organizing his sound-world not by using chord-structures and harmonic directions even remotely related to what composers had been doing for centuries before him but by creating music in layers which we call “polyphony” (many voices) or “counterpoint” (the skill of creating independent layers of voices related to each other) that often sound like several tempos playing simultaneously.

Playing a recording of the opening of “90+” – a work Carter composed for a colleague’s 90th birthday, written when he himself was a mere 86 – I pointed out that Carter chose ninety short, accented notes which are played in a slow tempo and then all around this, creating the other layers, are related notes and chords moving in different, often rapid but seemingly independent tempos. It’s a kind of “temporal” counterpoint, dealing with what sounds like “audibly independent tempos” all written out in some kind of common-denominator notation. But the relationship between these lines, these sonorities (“chords,” in a new-fashioned sense), may be no more organized than how composers worked 150 years ago.

Holding up my copy of Elliott Carter’s “Harmony Book,” I said it wasn’t really a book telling you how to write like Elliott Carter. It’s basically a collection of every possible pitch combination and how each one relates to other possible combinations – a chapter on chords of 5 notes shows you what 3- and 4-note chords are related to each of them and how you can add 1 note to them to make 6-note chords. And so on. Not great reading but for a composer in this style, a more systematic way of organizing your sound-world than just arbitrarily trying to find the next pitches you need and better, too, than re-inventing the wheel by exploring these possible relationships with each new piece you write.

(Afterward, I was amazed and delighted to have two students come up to me to look at the “Harmony Book,” both wanting to know how they can order copies for themselves! Whoa!)

In Beethoven’s day, composers may not have thought about it as “mathematically” as many of them might today, but the Rules of Harmony that evolved in the 18th and 19th Centuries were pretty specific about what you could and could not (or should not) do, not very different from the kind of thinking many composers in the 20th Century (that would be “the last century”) thought about tone rows in a system called serialism.

Carter’s was just another way of figuring out how to “organize sound” and yet still follow the same basic precepts that underlie all Western music – the idea of getting (or not getting) from beginning to end, creating variety but maintaining some kind of unified way of doing it. The structure may not sound the same but it is often, underneath, not very different from what people may be familiar with and find more easily likable because of its familiarity.

Here is a recording by Ursula Oppens of Elliott Carter's “90+” ...


Jeremy Gill, in his Eliot Fragments, taking part of its inspiration from lines of the poet T.S. Eliot, pays a musical tribute to Elliott Carter by incorporating ideas from 90+ into his own work. The students will have the rare opportunity of actually talking to a living composer and asking him questions about the music he composed and which they will then hear.

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Next, I talked briefly about two of the three piano pieces by György Ligeti on the program, from his first book of Etudes written in 1985. Ligeti was a Hungarian composer who was very much influenced by music from sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the mbira or “thumb piano.” He is more influenced by the way this music was organized, not so much by the actual sound of it, the way other composers usually incorporated elements of folk music into their own voices. (As a side-light, I mentioned I’m not sure what influenced Ligeti was actually folk music or the “art music” of this culture.)

There is a similar kind of “tempo-awareness” as in Carter’s music: in “Fanfares,” there is a consistent pattern of persistently rising notes pitted against a more rhythmic East European-like folk-dance which flash around in different registers, often colliding rhythmically which each other in the ways they tumble over each other and shift around the keyboard. In “Autumn in Warsaw,” the patterns are descending – given the title, it might be a musical depiction of falling leaves – but they also (as falling leaves do) move at different rates of speed. In fact, the pianist ends up playing sometimes four or five different “rates of speed” simultaneously – audibly perceived as different tempos, really – over a steady ostinato pattern in the background.

Again, this is counterpoint, layers of sound where the individual lines’ independence is clarified as much by pitch as it is by rhythm. Bach could write steady eighth notes in the right hand over steady quarter notes in the left hand which, essentially, means one is moving at half the speed of the other. It may sound like Ligeti is taking this to an extreme, but in reality, it’s not that different from what Bach did, just translated into a new approach.

Pianist Volker Banfield plays three of the Etudes (from Book 1) by György Ligeti which Matthew Bengtson will be performing on his Market Square Concerts recital this Sunday: first, "Fanfares" and "Rainbow"...



...then "Autumn in Warsaw."


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Tomorrow, I will post the portion of my talk about the Road-Map for the Goldberg Variations. But if you haven't already read it, check out "The Human Side" from an earlier post.

-- Dr. Dick, Market Square Concerts kammerblogger