SEMIBEGUN 002: LATER MUSIC FOR PERIOD INSTRUMENTS
Air Date: June 22, 2022
Period instruments––“authentic” restored and reproduced instruments such as the viol, harpsichord, and recorder, on which early music is performed–play between the realms of old and new, moving beyond the bounds of the period in these twenty-first century pieces. Includes works by Molly Herron, Niccolo Seligmann, La Nòvia, Sarah Davachi, Kali Malone, La Tène, Joanna Newsom, and more.
TRACKS
Niccolo Seligmann – Resilience
viola da gamba; 2020La Nòvia – Maintes fois - Nuit de noces
mixed ensemble w bagpipe, hurdy gurdy, banjo, vox; 2021Heather Mease – Kill Slay Mother
Science Ficta, violas da gamba; 2021Kali Malone – Velocity of Sleep
Peter Söderberg, theorbo; 2017Molly Herron – Lyra
Science Ficta, violas da gamba; 2021Niccolo Seligmann – Pipelines
viola da gamba; 2020Jorge Torres Saenz – Kokíla
Águeda González, harpsichord; 2007Wolgang Mitterer – Inwendig losgelöst: beilaufig tanzelnd
Freiburger Barockorchester, baroque orchestra and electronics; 2006Freya Waley Cohen – Caffeine
Tabea Debus, recorder; 2019Molly Herron – Roll
Science Ficta, violas da gamba; 2021Emil Wojtacki – Compline (Ángeloi): Canticum Simeonis and Antiphon
Cantata Profana, mixed baroque ensemble; 2016La Tène – Parade Du Soliat
hurdy gurdy, bagpipes, percussion, electronics; 2018Sarah Davachi – Stations IV & V
organ; 2020Niccolo Seligmann – After the Flood
viola da gamba, 2020Joanna Newsom – Peach, Plum, Pear
voice, harpsichord; 2004
What do iPods, harpsichords, Wii Remotes, and the RCA Mark II have in common? They’re all period instruments! Post-obsolescence, some things physically and culturally remain in landfills, as microplastics at the bottom of the ocean, while others float around in storage and imaginations until the time comes for second chances. The Elblag koboz waited hundreds of years at the bottom of medieval latrine for excavation and resurrection by early music scholars.[1] The RCA Mark II, a mid-century period instrument and once statement piece of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, now sits bolted to the floor in someone’s office at Columbia. Perhaps someday that office will become a latrine, and the instrument will too find a renaissance post-discovery. Or maybe not. How many times has Bach been “revived” and “rediscovered” since his death? Black is always in style and seemingly so is counterpoint, but maybe not everyone has always gotten the memo. This is all to say that what we perceive as obsolescent can cycle and recycle, within reason. The Airpods at the bottom of the ocean—those will unfortunately remain there and continue to pile. But if there’s a harpsichord sunken in the sea, an archeomusicologist will not let it stay there for long.
This mix focuses on later music written for earlier instruments since the year 2000. Another installment (or two) could easily cover composing for period instruments over the course of the last century. Of the period instruments, the harpsichord may have the greatest reach in the popular imagination as well as in the contemporary musical landscape.[2] I can’t quickly name pieces written for krummhorn or sackbut over the last hundred years, but many of the major twentieth century composers wrote for harpsichord in some capacity. The instrument features in Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress, ensemble pieces by Elliot Carter and Francis Poulenc, and in solo works such as Ligeti’s “Continuum” and “Hungarian Rock.” Insertions into the electroacoustic realm include John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s piece “HPSCHD” for harpsichord and computer-generated sound, receiving high praise from critic Simon Reynolds who called it “the worst avant-classical purchase I ever made.”[3] But never did the harpsichord entirely re-enter the canon as a contemporary instrument. Occasionally it becomes a modern period instrument such as with Wanda Landowska’s experiments building modern hybrid piano-harpsichord instruments in the early part of the last century and similarly performing with a hybridized style.[4] Many composers write beautifully for the instrument and evade pastiche, but rarely do I fail to source-bond its timbre to earlier music. It brings to the composer, the listener, and the performer the baggage of its period status. Performer and Professor of Harpsichord Joyce Lindorf describes this tension in “Contemporary Harpsichord Music: Issues for Composers and Performers” as it relates to the instrument’s revival: “As the harpsichord was re-discovered for both early and contemporary music, the instrument itself went through an evolutionary process, and performers and composers arrived at a crossroads.”[5] I don’t mean to sound too disparaging against the instrument and the history its sounds contain. In this house, we love Rameau, Couperin, Byrd, continuo, and the rest. Many composers want to lean into the instrument’s connection with a rich, earlier musical history, and sometimes contemporary composers want to thwart that relationship.
To the former approach, composers and AI programs dedicated to the practice of making new music that sounds like old music aren’t hard to find. As a digital humanities marriage between those two, the “Beethoven X” project unites machine learning experts and musicologists to finish Beethoven’s final unfinished symphony. As for communities, the Facebook group “Historical Composition” describes itself as “a place for composers of early music that aren't dead quite yet, and for all advocates of composition in styles that prevailed in the past. Here members may feel comfortable sharing their compositions, discussing technique, improvisation, and all things pertaining to the living art of historical composition.” It has a relatively active community, one that approaches historical composition quite seriously and narrowly; no P.D.Q. Bachs, no Stravinskys or Schnittkes, no parody, no patchwork postmodernists. The music is purely pastiche, as Frederic Jameson says, “blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor.”[6] A return to the past that on one hand appears to be a reactionary return to older forms also parallels postmodern, contemporary interests in revival, such as the recent resurgence of breakbeats. Although in contrast, much of that music is not as humorless. I like poking my head around the Historical Composition group from time to time. The music is interesting technically and the dedication to the subject is as impressive as any other fandom’s devotion. However, without at least a touch of parodic intent the work sounds almost like fanfiction.
I centered the issue of how to approach or not approach the viola da gamba as a period instrument when composing my own piece in this mix. Originally, I wanted to compose something akin to Molly Herron’s treatment of the ensemble on her album Through Lines, playing with familiar gestures and while motioning towards familiarity through pitch content and devices like imitation. Molly Herron figured out a very lovely way to do it without merely producing pastiche, as did Kali Malone with theorbo in Velocity of Sleep and Sarah Davachi with a fifteenth century pipe organ in the Stations pieces. I, however, could not figure out how to achieve the balance I envisioned through dots and lines. Instead, I chose to compose through this issue of the instrument and performer as historically informed through exploration of memory. The text score follows:
the house of the mother of the
about things remembered, things unremembered, misremembered, remembered only through media and the accounts of others, real and unreal, memories. perform memories of sounds that exist or that may exist, as they rise to the surface, familiar, and sink back down at just approaching the edge of recognition, on the tip of the tongue. fluctuate between modes of being stuck, trapped in a state of repetition, and unstuck, churning through ideas that still never quite materialize. quietly, but not always softly, rising just to conversational level before pulling back. move together through these regions.
1
wait
begin sparsely, separately
2
continue as necessary
stuck and unstuck
3
material constructed from surroundings
yours becomes yours becomes theirs becomes yours
converge, in a sense
4
movement slows until at rest on individual ideas, very softly
end together
(~7 minutes)
The piece, the house of the mother of the, premiered for four viols (played by Science Ficta) accompanied by a two-channel video installation in a small living room scene. A CRT and a projector played different generations of home movies both in terms of media and family. A heavily edited and digitally distorted 8mm film from my mom’s childhood projected onto the wall while a little TV set on a wooden table played camcorder video of my paternal grandmother’s birthday party some twenty-five years after the 8mm film. My dad’s voice adds commentary from behind the camera which came through the TV on stage. In both video channels my mom occasionally comes into view either as a baby or as an awkward woman in her mid-twenties. We both don’t handle family functions very well in much the same ways.
The title “the house of the mother of the” references a pair of architectural sculptures memorializing Jan Palach’s self-immolation in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia: “The House of the Suicide and the House of the Mother of the Suicide.”[7] Both structures are large steel cubes donning crowns of tall spikes. The House of the Suicide’s shiny stainless steel and fanned thorns contrasts the Mother’s rusty exterior with dulled protrusions pointing straight towards the sky. Sketches by architect John Hejduk from the early 1980s refer to the spikes as “metal shards of memory.”[8] The subtle contrasts in design point to different types of memory overlapping—the familial memory of a lost child and the national memory of a lost struggle. A poem by David Shapiro, “The Funeral of Jan Palach,” sits between the two structures in Prague, just outside of the Rudolfinum.
When I entered the first meditation
I escaped the gravity of the object,
I experienced the emptiness,
And I have been dead a long time.[9]
In BOMB magazine architect Carlos Brillembourg places the poem as the mediator between the event and the architecture.[10] Gesturing beyond the silence of their media, the poem and structures both motion towards the intense sonic imprint and dissonance of the event. In four stanzas, Shapiro depicts a sound world simultaneously within the vacuum of space, the clamor of media coverage, the quieting of snow, and Jan Palach’s amplified voice and political message within the flaming roar of his death. The Houses mirror this incongruent sonic environment with the quiet, inward-facing mother in contrast to the son’s outward explosion of spikes representing, according to Hejduk’s daughter, the sonic event of Jan’s death as a “sound going out into the universe as an act against the apathy of the students in 1968.”[11] I was inspired by the communication and exchange between all the elements: the two structures, the severity of media and form, and the devastating text and deafening silence between them. I reinterpreted these ideas through film, video, and the media’s texture as well as the score’s text and its resulting realization. The performance intertwines many threads of overlapping memory, from cultural memory within the texture of a particular medium like film grain or these Renaissance instruments, to personal memory within the content of these films or the trained hands of specialist performers.
the house of the mother of the reverses the roles between parent and child and inverts the cultural significance. My grandfather died by suicide after a long struggle with mental health and the death of my grandmother. The event impacted my mom profoundly and over time I watched her rewrite the narrative of the relationship with her parents from one of resentment oversteered into reverence. The two channels help illuminate, for me, the complexity of this person I love through documentary footage of her life. There is nothing conclusive to draw from it, but the juxtaposition is meaningful enough.
The premiere succeeded in some of this vision but not in terms of sound, unsurprising since no explicit instructions for the expectations of sound production were included in the score. Science Ficta did a fine job, but the piece was not what I envisioned. In the back of my mind sat wasted plans to compose canons and motets and lush harmonies in just intonation. So, I put away the recording for a while not knowing what to do with it. Eventually I decided to reinterpret the recorded material in the spirit of the score. I completely recomposed the piece by cutting the audio and arranging the samples into motivic ideas that expand and compress, disappearing into the texture and reappearing as a memory recalled. I collapsed the two channels of video into one, analog and digital grain intermingled. The video now takes up only a portion of the screen to mimic the focus of the small television on stage. The track Kill Slay Mother, included in this mix, is just a fixed version of the piece without video and is part of an album No One Nothing Never. The audio in both the album and video versions are the same, but without video the work changes and so the name changes as well.
The crossroads between early and new opens as many possibilities for experimentation as it does possible pigeonholes. That tension is worth exploring, exploding, and subverting. The artists in this mix negotiate that balance. None present pure imitation of historical styles and conversely none completely exit the orbit of the historical imagination. Getting close through exploration of timbre and texture feels fabulous, but not getting there isn’t a failure. The “period” of period instruments can expand and redefine itself. We can hear the harpsichord as a period instrument of 2000’s hip hop and 1960’s baroque rock and avant-garde concert music. What’s the fun in sound without these cultural associations?
[1] Ian Pittaway, “The Elbląg ‘gittern’: a case of mistaken identity. Part 1/2: Why the koboz was misidentified,” Early Music Muse, 24 May 2023, <https://earlymusicmuse.com/koboz1/>.
[2] Including and beyond Sir Thomas Beecham’s “two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm” famous timbral descriptor.
[3] Simon Reynolds, Retromania, 385.
[4] Joyce Lindorf, “Contemporary Harpsichord Music: Issues for Composers and Performers,” DMA thesis, (The Julliard School, 1982), 25.
[5] Ibid., 1.
[6] Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1998), 131.
[7] After reinstallation in 2016, the structures go by a new name: “House of the Son and House of the Mother.”
[8] “The House of the Suicide,” Living Prague, accessed 21 September 2023, < https://livingprague.com/architecture-design/house-of-the-suicide/>.
[9] John Hejduk, “Poetry and Architecture, Architecture and Poetry,” BOMB, Fall 1992, < https://bombmagazine.org/articles/poetry-and-architecture-architecture-and-poetry/>.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Mimi Zeiger, “John Hejduk's The House of the Suicide structures get new life in Prague,” The Architect’s Newspaper, 19 January 2016, <https://www.archpaper.com/2016/01/hejduks-house-suicide-structures-get-new-life-prague/>.