SUNDAYCOL

PAUL: I HAVE TO GIVE A LECTURE IN THE MORNING, IN AROUND NOON. HERE’S ANOTHER COPY OF MY SUNDAY COLUMN; I DON’T SEE WHERE ANY WORDS ARE MISSING UNLESS JON DID SOME EDITING> ANYHOW, I’LL SEE YOU LATER — ALAN [F/L]Paul Hillier, much respected for his recordings of early music with his Hilliard
Ensemble, brings his forces to town on April 3 for the first American
performance of the “Berlin Mass” by the contemporary Estonian-born composer
Arvo Part. New Albion, a record label renowned for its service to hardcore
contemporary music, has just produced a disc of early 15th century music from
the Island of Cyprus. Something seems to connect certain kinds of very old and
very new music, and the connections are fascinating.
Take that collection from Cyprus as a starting point. The disc contains 16
pieces, some sacred and some secular, composed at the court of Cyprus during a
brief flowering of high culture on the island, collected in a manuscript now in
a library in Turin. The performers are the members of P. A. N. (Project Ars
Nova) based in Basel. The music is, for the most part, intricately composed,
sometimes with three or more vocal parts sung simultaneously but using
different texts and moving at different tempos.
Beyond question, hearing this music is an exotic experience. The harmonies are
both rich and austere, something like the stretched-out perspective of medieval
paintings on gold backgrounds. By the standards we are most familiar with, the
harmonic style from Bach to Mahler, the music constantly eludes our
expectation, veering wildly into unexpected regions. These regions were not, of
course, “unexpected” to their anonymous composers. If there isn’t a word for
the auditory equivalent of “hindsight,” there ought to be. Try as we might,
we cannot help but bring the full range of our previous listening — Mozart,
the Beatles, whatever — to any and every new experience that comes our way.
Inevitably, we bring some of that same process to hearing new music. There,
too, as in those 15th-century Cyprus songs (which on their own, by the way,
are marvelous, flavorsome pieces) our expectations are constantly being
tricked. As we hear this old music with our late-20th-century ears, we derive
the completely twisted picture of the composer who refuses to follow the
classic rules — even though those “rules” hadn’t yet been invented. We react
in much the same way to first hearings of music of our own time. This is not to
state, of course, that the way to hear very new music is to steep yourself in
very old, but it sometimes helps.
Some modern composers, of course, draw the past around themselves as a sort of
justification for their own innovations. Arnold Schoenberg, early in his
career, was fascinated by the revival in Germany and Austria of the music of
the great 14th-century musician/poet Guillaume de Machaut, especially in the
way Machaut often constructed music around formal devices that no listener
could ever be expected to hear.
One of Machaut’s most famous songs is titled “My End is My Beginning,” and in
the song the tenor part follows the soprano line note-for-note, but backwards.
Nobody could ever hear what Machaut is doing here, and that doesn’t matter; it
is simply a great secret stroke of structural genius and, of course, it fits
the text. Schoenberg’s later theories of twelve-tone writing, as he himself
acknowledged, drew some of their inspiration from this great idea of building a
piece of music around a sense of order strong yet inaudible.
No composer ever shakes completely free of music’s rich and glorious past.
Some, in fact, wallow in it.
The late Harry Partch, that sterling iconoclast whose dance-drama “The
Bewitched” has just reappeared on a CRI compact disc, decided early in his
career that music had started to go wrong around the Middle Ages. He spent his
life working out a system of composition, for which he designed and built his
own instruments, that would, he fondly imagined, transport our senses back to
the scales and melodies of ancient Greece. On a diametrically opposite level,
Germany’s Carl Orff, who figures as one of the enemy forces in the
“degenerate” art exhibits currently around town, served his Nazi masters by
turning music from an ancient Bavarian manuscript into latter-day marching and
drinking songs; hence, “Carmina Burana.”
The matter of Arvo Part is particularly interesting. He is, first of all, the
best-known of a small group of important names to emerge from Estonia, whence
no names had emerged before: the composer Eduard Tubin a generation back, and
the conductor Neeme Jarvi — newly appointed music director of the Detroit
Symphony who, like Part, fled his country some years ago fearing political
oppression.
Part currently lives in West Berlin. His early music includes three symphonies
(recorded by Jarvi on Sweden’s B-I-S label). They are strong, compact works,
densely contrapuntal, extroverted in their orchestral brilliance. But then, in
the mid-1970s, Part’s music took a strange turn toward a much more inward,
almost mystical style. The first record of his music to achieve fame in this
country contained a series of quiet, still pieces that seemed, in ways not
easily described, to invoke a sense of the distant musical past: the austere
harmonies, once again, of Machaut.
Then came the incredible “Passio” of 1982, 71 minutes of music so still, yet
so gripping, that it seems to move out beyond such secular matters as time. It
is, again, music of a medieval sensibility — not because it imitates the music
of the past, which it doesn’t, but because its subtle, other-worldly sounds
inspire the same feelings as you might find on entering a great Gothic
cathedral. To hear Part’s “Passio” — a setting of verses from the Passion as
told in the Book of John, for small chorus with instrumental quartet and organ
— is to journey to Cologne in front of your own stereo.
The recording of “Passio,”on the ECM label, is by Hillier and his Hilliard
Ensemble, and this is reason enough to look forward to the same group’s
performance here of the new Part work, April 3 at St. Basil’s Church in
downtown Los Angeles, part of MaryAnn Bonino’s “Historic Sites” concert
series.
Like Arvo Part, Hillier himself has made a world for himself balanced between
the very up-to-date present and the distant past. One of his most fascinating
recordings, on the ECM label, is called “Proensa,” after an ancient version
of the name Provence, that fragrant region in the south of France that nurtured
the great tradition of the Troubadours, those poetic wanderers whose aim was to
fill the world with song.
Hillier has, on this disc, sampled the surviving examples of medieval solo
song, and reconstructed a series of glosses on these songs, combining in a most
attractive way elements of past and present. Three players on ancient
instruments, such as the Troubadours themselves might use, are his backing. The
music is purely joyous. Hillier, by the way, has abandoned his London base for
a time and joined the music faculty of U.C. Davis: a welcome presence
indeed.