Notes on the Emerson Bicentennial scheduled for May 13 Poet John Hollander will host an evening celebrating the Emerson bicentennial. The event will include readings and musical settings, including five new settings of poems by Emerson, performed by the Cygnus Ensemble. The program also includes two important settings of Hollander's work by Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. There are few poets whose work has been set so frequently by major American composers as John Hollander. "Philomel," Milton Babbitt’s landmark work is one example, and Elliott Carter’s "Of Challenge and of Love" on this program is another, as well as his collaborations with George Perle and Hugo Weisgall. Dr. Hollander has written several volumes of poetry and seven books of criticism. His honors include the Bollingen and the Levinson Prizes; the MLA Shaughnessy Medal; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, he is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale. Dr. Hollander opens the program with a discu RALPH WALDO EMERSON BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION Charles Ives Songs 8pm Part II William Anderson Bacchus (Emerson) Entr’acte: David Starobin "Three Places in New
Rochelle" Dr. John Hollander on the universe vs. pluriverse We have asked each composer to talk about their relation to Emerson, and their choice of text: Robert Martin Emerson Songs
Music is often called the most abstract of the arts. In its pure form, this abstraction tends only to reference ideas within the music itself. For example, the recapitulation of a Sonata allegro form references the exposition. There are occasions, however, when composers are able to reference extra-musical ideas using musical structure as a symbol of those ideas. Many of the great composer—including Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven —were able to use the abstraction of music to create vivid metaphors. The true connection between these structures and symbols are almost never apparent at first glance, but once discovered, they enhance the musical meaning immeasurably. Usually I shy away from discussing structure in my music. It’s a cumbersome topic. When pressed, I usually change the subject to painting, and answer in a round-about way. For me, answering questions about my musical structures is like a painter answering questions about each brush stroke. Certainly there are more enjoyable things to do, like looking at the painting. Yet there are those who are interested in brush strokes. In my case, I would prefer others to tread that pathway of discovery by themselves. The structures of my compositions vary greatly from piece to piece, and many have relationships within them that have only remote theoretical precedents. I recognize that it is difficult to tackle something that is new—so perhaps some guidance is necessary. Let me stress one thing before going further. I am a big picture person. I like hierarchies, especially the important parts. True—details are important, and great music results from the attention to many details. But to be successful, these details must support the greater artistic goal—the big picture. Without this, all is lost. “What do you read, my lord?” Polonius asks. “Words, words, words,” Hamlet replies. Is Hamlet really telling us that focusing on details may result in the loss of the big picture? However, let’s start by examining some musical words. Perhaps one analogy of a word in music—certainly there are many—is what’s known as a “tone row.” Our present musical system of tuned pitches—those found on a piano—consists of twelve distinct tones. There are many more keys on the piano, both black and white, but the others vibrate at multiples of twice or factors of half the speed of the basic twelve. When you collect one of each of these twelve basic tones, they become like prime numbers—all the other tones that exist in our system contain them in some way. If you play these tones in immediate ascending order, you get something very basic—the chromatic scale which is, in fact, a tone row. Arnold Schoenberg was the first composer to consciously recognize the value of putting one of each of these tones together in a row. Immediately, many other composers understood the beauty of the concept. It’s useful as a unit of musical communication. Schoenberg presented several ways to modify tone rows—move them up or down (transposition), put them upside down (inversion), or backwards (retrograde), or both upside down and backwards (retrograde inversion). For many decades and for many composers, these variations, or classical transformations as I call them, provided plenty of raw material with which to build larger musical structures. In the immediate years to follow, Alban Berg began using
more than one tone row in his large musical structures in order to support
a greater artistic goal. Berg used multiple rows for contrast—for
example, to delineate characters in his operas. Despite this breakthrough—using
more than one row in a piece—a practice emerged among most composers
that a single piece of music is usually built on a single tone row (including
its classical transformations stated above). All works of art have the
countervailing forces of contrast and unity. This practice of one tone
row per piece provides the unity; the contrast comes from elsewhere. A little later, Milton Babbitt separated tone rows into halves and found patterns in how they could be recombined—without repeating any of the tones. He called this feature “combinatoriality.” This allowed composers to identify, with more confidence, how parts of the tone rows could appear with one another in complimentary ways. Charles Wuorinen drew on yet a different feature—which requires a little explanation. Each note of a tone row can be assigned a number—one to twelve, (or zero to eleven). One of the classical transformations—the inversion—can be interpreted as multiplying each assigned number by eleven and applying a modulus twelve operation. A modulus twelve operation is nothing more than what an ordinary clock does—instead of going to thirteen o’clock, it goes back to one o’clock. This clock analogy is useful in music because the twelve hours are like the twelve notes in the chromatic scale—each time you reach the end, you just repeat it. Instead of multiplying by eleven, Wuorinen multiplied using different numbers—five and seven worked particularly well because the resulting rows still had one of each tone—they were still true tone rows. Richard Rodney Bennett, the first student of Pierre Boulez, introduced me to these musical properties in 1971. He stressed that the presence or absence of certain intervals—an interval is the distance between two tones—gave each row a distinct “sound.” Just as Dylan Thomas was fascinated with the sound of words, I, as a young composer, was fascinated with the “sound” of different tone rows. Here, however, is an important principle. When you rearrange the tones, you get a different tone row—but you have changed two aspects, not just one. First, you have changed the order of the tones. Second, you have changed the intervals. Of course, when stated so plainly, this seems quite obvious. The tones and the intervals are inextricably linked. However, over the years I met many composers who seemed to focus only on the tones; I attended many lectures where the intervals were never mentioned. Let’s examine one of Schoenberg’s classical transformations—the inversion. When you turn a tone row upside down, you are really turning all the intervals upside down. If you start with an ascending chromatic scale, you end up with a descending chromatic scale—the two tone rows do not have a single interval in common. Don’t get me wrong—the inversion is a fascinating relationship. Composers well before Schoenberg knew that, and presented inversions in imaginative ways. It’s just that as a young composer I asked the following question—if the “sound” of a tone row derives from the intervals—can there be closely related rows, based on interval content, that we are unaware of? Again, let me restate the question—is there something basic that we are missing? The answer is—indeed—“yes.” So, I devised a way to locate these closely related tone rows. I called this newly discovered relationship by the term “organic.” These new tone row relationships could only be explained by the “sound,” that is the coincidence of their intervals. They do not fit in with the methods used to produce the classical transformations. Rather, these relationships are “organically related.” To review, organically related tone rows sound close to a specific original row because they have much of (or all of) the same intervallic content—more so than the classical transformations. Start with a tone row. Then, ask the question, “how
close can I get to it with regard to its intervals?” Implicit in
this question is, “how close can I get to the original tone row without
duplicating it?” If you simply duplicate it, then it would be identical,
in other words, “too close.” Again to review, the ascending chromatic scale has only minor seconds and the descending chromatic scale has only major sevenths. Let’s quickly add to this collection the circle of fourths and the circle of fifths (tone rows which only have fourths and fifths, respectively). Now we have a number of “single interval” tone rows—tone rows where only a single interval is present. We cannot go further in these directions—we must turn around in order to look for more tone rows, and the tone rows that we will discover will have more than one single interval. I speak about travelling toward or away from these single interval tone rows. I picture a universe where tone rows are located in various positions (these are conceptual positions, and you need not think of them in three dimensional space). The single interval tone rows are at the extreme edge of this universe. There are no more tone rows beyond these final boundaries. Assume we are in the middle of the universe (the great cluster of all tone rows). As we travel toward the edges (where the single interval rows represent the final outer limits of the universe), it is fascinating to ask, “how close can we go, without actually arriving at the final boundaries?” You might be starting to appreciate the emphasis that I place on the intervals. Each tone row contains twelve tones. In between, there are eleven intervals. One interval separates each pair of tones. Let’s try another exercise—for me, this next example is the natural opposite of the “single interval” row. If we start at “C” and go a minor second up to “C#,” then a major second down (or minor seventh up) to “B,” then a minor third up to “D,” then a major third down (minor sixth up) to A#, and so on in this pattern, we will have a tone row that has one of each of the eleven intervals. How close can we get to this row in terms of intervals, or in other words, can we construct other tone rows that have one of each interval? Yes, we can. There are plenty of additional “all-interval” tone rows—in fact, there are 3,856 if you only start on “C.” But just remember, half of these are inversions. So, “all-interval” tone rows have one of each tone, and one of each interval. When it comes to tones and intervals, they have one of everything. But let’s make it harder by adding another constraint.
Let’s say that the intervals in the tone row must be identical both
backwards and forwards. If you think that is arcane, you are right. For
example, there are not many sentences that can be read—letter by
letter—backwards and forwards, but here is one—“Live not
on evil.” The “L” in “Live” relates to the “l”
in “evil,” the “i” in “Live” relates to
the “i” in “evil,” and slowly you work your way letter
by letter toward the middle—where finally you reach the letter “t.”
This “t” is in the exact middle and can be read coming and going.
In music, there is only one interval that can be read coming and going—the
tritone (just remember, “t” is for “tritone”). The
tritone has this special property because it equally subdivides the octave
in halves—so in either direction this interval appears the same. Remember, there are tone rows that are all-interval, but not symmetrical—and there are tone rows that are symmetrical that are not all-interval, but let’s don’t get sidetracked. As far as tone rows that are both all-intervals and symmetrical, they number 176, however, half of them are inversions—that’s 88. Each one has the interval of a tritone exactly at its center (it is analogous to the “t” in “Live not on evil”). You now have some necessary background for understanding the musical symbolism that we will examine next. The first of the three songs is titled The Nature of God.
It is the first two paragraphs from Emerson’s essay titled Circles
as follows: This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the
Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never
meet, at once inspirer and condemner of every success, may conveniently
serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every department.
But it’s not unattainable for music theorists. In the attached chart at the conclusion of this essay, I listed all 87 tone rows, including exactly where in the score they are located and what instruments play each one. The missing tone row does not appear anywhere. So good luck finding it, and let me know when you do. In any artistic creation, there is a hierarchy of components—some elements are more important than others. We like order. We like things we can understand. The human mind tries to impose this hierarchy, whether it is intrinsically present or not. Heinrich Schenker was an important theorist in the early twentieth century. Just as Sigmund Freud divided the mind into three layers—the “super ego,” the “ego” and the “id”—Schenker divided classical music into three layers—the foreground, the middleground and the background. And similarly, the precise dividing lines between the layers are often unclear. It’s not an exact science and often I have been confused in lectures concerning the fine distinctions between the closer middleground and the deeper middleground. The human mind tries to impose order over anything it perceives. Throw a handful of pebbles on the beach—see the pattern? Look up at the clouds—again, see the pattern? Watch a fire dying in a fireplace. It is no surprise that we hear musical order in the music of the great masters who were interested in creating musical order. Some tones in music certainly are more important—and we hear them more vividly and remember them longer. They might even return at the conclusion of the piece to confirm our suspicion of their importance. But there’s a problem. Just as some of my thoughts—thoughts that should have remained buried deep in my “id”—sometimes seem to leap all the way up into my “super ego,” similarly, some tones have roles in more than one layer simultaneously. Although our attempt to impose order is always at work, the precise distinction between layers is not always clear. Human minds are incessantly acrobatic, but are disciplined only reluctantly. Today, the approach of Schenker is well known, and it affects the way we think about and even compose music. Once a theory is revealed, a composer can follow it—but he can also present the theory practitioners with deliberate problems or ambiguities. For example, some of my compositions have clouds of rapid notes in the background. These notes don’t behave in a way that encourages a music theorist to easily identify a label for them, rather they bubble, percolate, splash, drip and are sprayed over the musical space. Which drop of rain do you think is the most important? In cases like this, I cannot help but wonder which small detail does the human mind latch onto?—it must be the droplet that happens to hit you on the nose. Along these lines, I especially like to create situations where the background and foreground, which are both clearly presented, deliberately intersect—I call these occurrences “strange intersections.” One of these strange intersections is in No. 36 in my Diary of a Seducer, at measure 129, where all three guitarists play a single note that is both in the foreground and the background at the same time. However, in The Nature of God, I decided to play by the rules and try to follow the practice of the theory—I want to show that I really am a team player. Normally, I don’t believe that background tones need to be unduly stressed, but I find that, in face of subtly, Schenker enthusiasts are left sometimes disturbed and uncertain. There are various forms of stress in music—stress can be achieved with a longer duration, or a louder dynamic, or a thicker scoring. To be safe, I decided to use all these techniques so the background notes couldn’t be missed—by listener or theorist. The deeper background notes (a single, all-interval symmetrical tone row is used for the deeper background) are four half notes in duration, scored for all six instruments (alto flute, English horn, both guitars, violin and cello), and marked mezzo forte. Each time one of these deeper background notes occurs, it should be clear that we have moved to a new position in the background. Further, to prevent confused arguments about which note is in which level, this pattern of clarity continues in the closer background, as well as the deeper and closer middlegrounds. In fact, any musician in the ensemble, simply by examining various characteristics of a particular note in his part, can declare with confidence what level it is in. Here there is no more debate about distinctions between layers. This is a clearly ordered world. When examined, this world reveals patterns. Wherever he looks, Emerson sees the recurring patterns of circles, and at every level in the music, the all interval symmetrical tone rows represent these recurring patterns. As you study the attached chart, these patterns will become even clearer. All moving simultaneously, there are (1) large slower structures that move through the background, (2) medium middleweight structures that move slightly faster through the middleground, and (3) light rapid configurations that sparkle in the foreground—all of this material is made only of all-interval symmetrical tone rows. Each tone row is different (like snowflakes), however, each tone row symbolically offers the same message—“within me, the universe is contained” and “I am circular.” The “universe” is the completeness of all the tones and all the intervals within each tone row. The “circularity” is the symmetrical or palindrome-like nature of each tone row. And at each level, you have the same thing—more all-interval symmetrical tone rows. Recently, at a reception, I had the honor to meet Benoit Mandelbrot. He is an expert on fractals (natural or mathematical patterns that repeat at every level). Watching clouds is watching fractals—at a distance, they look like clouds, and closer up they still look like clouds. The closer you get, the more cloud-like detail is visible—in other words, they look the same. The big picture and the detail is identical. There really is no vantage point from which you can view a cloud so that it doesn’t look like a cloud. The Mandelbrot set is one mathematical representation of this phenomenon. I spent many hours exploring the Mandelbrot set and pondering its equation. The visual representation makes the equation far more understandable than it would be otherwise. If you think of one end of the spectrum of colors as “high” and the other end of the spectrum of colors as “low,” you can fly or hover in immense vertical space of this mathematical definition. In this world, there are precipices and canyons of infinite height and depth. The model may appear to be simple at first, but soon you have revealed before you a world of never ending, rich complexity, and it continues forever. This world is beautiful and eerie, and one awe-struck traveler described it as “grapes on God’s personal vine.” There has been much discussion about fractal aspects in music. Certainly there are isolated fractal occurrences. An ornament may contain the same succession of notes that are found in the underlying formal key pattern. But one instance where a single detail resembling the larger structure is far from fractal. Even if several fractal-like details are found, it remains only a collection of several fractal-like details—not an integrated fractal environment. Trying to adapt this fractal concept successfully into music is problematic—and much of the problem may lie with us. We are accustomed to music which arrives at a goal. The visual exploration of the Mandelbrot set is not goal oriented. The wonder and excitement is in the exploration—there is no correct or best way to explore it. There is no gentle entry and no climatic arrival. It’s a continuum. If music could do this, the first requirement would be that it would have to go on forever and have no beginning. I believe that The Nature of God represents a rather abstracted approach to capture this great fractal metaphor. I am approaching it poetically, rather than mathematically. Fractals are mathematical representations of nature, and nature seems to be filled with unending fractal-like phenomena. So, I placed the 87 all-interval symmetrical tone rows in overlapping patterns throughout the piece in an attempt to portray the idea of fractals—but never losing sight of the greater artistic goal to support the text and move toward the song’s conclusion with a sense of inevitability. Again, I believe that these greater artistic goals run contrary to a literal portrayal of fractals, however, I’m sure others will debate these points far more thoroughly. There are 365 measures in The Nature of God—the number of days that the earth takes to make a circle, (really, an ellipse), around the sun. Actually, the length of time it takes for the earth to travel around the sun is slightly longer than 365 days by about a quarter of a day. In our calendars, we compensate for this inaccuracy by adding one day (February 29) every four years. This is not a perfect solution and we make additional adjustments based on what century it is. I have accounted for this inaccuracy by four fermata’s. But no one should try to calculate and perform the length of the fermata’s based on the actual amount that the earth takes to complete it’s yearly journey. On the contrary, this is only another symbol, and should not interfere with good taste and clear judgment in performance practice. One fermata occurs in the first measure, and one occurs in the last measure. The other two occur at symmetrical locations on notes in the deeper middleground. Therefore, since deeper middleground tones last two measures, these locations are not precisely symmetrical in terms of measure count. These inner fermatas are followed by double bars in order to delineate the form. The exact center of the piece is measure 183—or, more precisely, the second beat of measure 183. At this precise point, the soprano sings the word “life” as part of the phrase “Our life is an apprenticeship,” placing our “life” at the exact center of the piece. By this, I mean to symbolize that each of us lives a life that is the center of many concentric circles. I believe that the use of melissma is the most expressive idiomatic feature of singing. Here, a melissma sets apart and emphasizes the word “God.” The word “trace” traces a melodic outline through the use of a melissma. The word “flying” flies on the wings of melissma, and the culmination of the word “never” is—for a moment—never reached, thanks to the use of melissma. Finally, the word “outdone” is, itself, outdone, by occurring on successively higher notes. The second song in the set is titled Travel and it can be
found in Emerson’s essay titled Self-Reliance as follows: Although my music is quite often highly structured—as this essay presents—nevertheless, there are sometimes questions as to whether it has any structure. And here is an excellent example of why those questions will probably always persist. This particular series of tone rows occur (in the overall musical structure) in three layers. Each layer is made of the same series of tone rows but at an interval of a major third distance above and below. However, none of these layers is presented in its entirety. Here, (and this is sometimes the case in my music), a theorist attempting to analyze this music must find clues, and then fill in the missing material in order to better understand the structure—and musical theorists are not used to assuming the role of archeologists. It is archeologists who always must approach spotty evidence, then piece together what is missing to form ideas about what has happened in the past. No one expect elements to be missing in a piece of music. But why is anything missing, anyway? After all, I could
have put it all in. The reason is artistic, not theoretical. I believe
that in poetry, what is left unsaid is as important as what is said. I
overheard a comment recently among people viewing a painting. One exclaimed,
“It’s amazing how little you can paint in order to suggest the
human body.” Here, I have erased many notes from this structure.
You are hearing musical erosion, that is, until the last several measures
where the full strata is revealed. Until then, although many notes are
missing, they are nevertheless implied or suggested. Perhaps on successive
hearings, you might hear some of these missing notes—I do. You may
be surprised that it is possible to hear missing notes because the musical
structure sets up a sense of inevitability. Can there be any other route
of progress along the established trajectory? Therefore, to express it
with less creates poetry. The last song is titled Roses. It also in Emerson’s
essay titled Self-Reliance. Here is the text: In this last song, I used an analogous approach. I picked up discarded fragments of unused portions of my unfinished pieces. I tore the pages that were left intact, shuffled these scraps, then pieced them together again. Even in this approach, I was not consistent. In the terminology of painting, I splashed the canvas, watched washes of color descend, and cherished rogue drips. As my painter friends would say, I allowed accidents to happen. While I worked, I had no structural plan except to achieve the most effective way to convey the text, and thought only of the musical moment at hand. I threw away my coherent compositional technique—developed over so many decades—and relied only on my faith in my ability to compose without the conscious attempt to compose. Consider the musical structures moving from song to song. We moved from a grandly worked out musical structure, then traveled through a structure with deliberately missing components, and finally arrived in a musical structure hewn almost arbitrarily from broken and discarded fragments. In the text of the first song we sought knowledge of God. We looked outward from ourselves. The musical structure was intricate, with only one element missing representing the unattainable—what man has yet to discover. In the text of the second song, we sought knowledge of ourselves. The erasure marks in the musical structure represent the flaws in humankind’s character, his defects and imperfections. A perfect human would not be missing any aspects of character, but that’s not us, and it’s not this song. Changing physical or geographic locations does not remove or improve our flaws—we take them wherever we go—we can not run away from ourselves. Therefore, despite the missing elements, the structure arrives finally at the point where it began. We cannot run away from our faults, and similarly, this musical structure cannot escape its own journey to where it started. Don’t regret the past; don’t envy or fear the future. The message of the last song is that living in the present is an important part of a spiritual existence. And, after the conclusion of the searches in the first two songs, we were unexpectedly led in the direction of spirituality—perhaps, a footstep we could not have taken on our own—and it happened at the very moment that we were unselfconscious about musical structure. Some questions remain unanswered, but it’s time to accept the flow of the music at the moment we hear it and accept the flow of life at the moment we live it. No plan is perfect. We must adapt to a changing situation
and we must change with it. The art of music composition involves the
structuring of time, and our musical structures, themselves, can become
symbols of ideas outside the realm of music—even the idea that only
at the moment when we cease to be conscious of musical structure, do we
understand and coalesce with it. Robert Martin began composing at
age 10. After receiving Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Music Composition
from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, he worked at various jobs, including
as an apprentice in pipe organ restoration. William Anderson I wrote this setting in 1997 for my parents' 40 wedding anniversary. Phyllis Bryne-Julson sang it at Merkin Hall in February 1998. I'm with Emerson to the extent that Emerson is a surrealist. As I understand it, the surrealists are nihilists who allow themselves a fascination with form. The compassionate surrealist shows others how to find amusement in form, untroubled by the reality that all form is transitory. These lines from Emerson's Merlin II alway have a powerful effect on me, perhaps not exactly as Emerson intended them; yet Emerson's Platonizing is easily forgiven because he so often goes in the opposite direction: The animals are sick with love, lovesick with rhyme... The sickness is hyperbole, but also suggests the mutability and impermanence of form. (?) Emerson speaks of this impermanence often, despite the fact that he finds a kind of immortality in ideal form--(the "eternal men" that ends Bacchus) Subtle rhyme with ruin rife As with sickness, so with ruin. All forms add up to 0. (?) Here and elsewhere Emerson sounds like a compassionate nihilist with a love for creation (form) regardless of its impermanence, its contingencies--a surrealist, as far as I understand the surrealists. There is much in Emerson that points to the unique, the contingent, the pluriverse as opposed to the universe, and what looks like Platonizing is often so cleverly and ambiguously couched that it suggests its own antithesis. The progression that Robert Martin maps in his Emerson songs (through his choice of text and through his treatment of them) was revelatory, showing two very different sides of Emerson. Celebrating Emerson would be an academic exercize if we did not conisider Emerson in the light of contemporary thought. Above I am suggesting that Emerson anticipates Pierce, Wm. James and the surrealists. How does Emerson's thought hold up for a postmodernist? If I understand correctly, one of the arguments of the
transcendenalists is that our common moral sense can be attributed only
to some transcendental understanding. (The extent of the existence of
a common moral sense is the interesting question that we have to leave
aside for now.)
see
Robert Pollock 2 guitars, violin, 'cello, fl, ob
Robert Pollock - Composer and pianist
He has received numerous commissions and awards including
the Guggenheim What I admire most about Emerson's writings is his ability
to explain life's secrets. Whether it is his 'person fits event like hand
in glove;' or his holonic (Wilber) "circles," that transcend
and include the previous ones, Emerson gives us a handle on life's deep,
sometimes elusive issues. Frank Brickle Merlin I Wild-rose, Lily, Dry Vanilla
Where the fungus broad and red
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