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RECITAL 1996--PROGRAM NOTES
Kazuo Fukushima: Mei
Morton Feldman: Why Patterns?
- Intermission -
François Couperin: Les goûts-réünis: neuviéme concert intitulé Ritratto dell'Amore
Johann Sebastian Bach: Sonata in A major
The German music critic and administrator Dr. Wolfgang Steinecke was responsible for the rise of Darmstadt as a center for avant-garde music. His untimely death in 1961 occurred just after Kazuo Fukushima had been invited to Darmstadt to lecture on Noh plays and modern Japanese music. Flutist Severino Gazzelloni, celebrated for his advocacy of contemporary music and long a fixture at Darmstadt, commissioned from Fukushima a solo flute piece in memory of Dr. Steinecke; Mei was the result.
Fukushima has long had a special interest in gagaku and Noh music, in both of which flute-like instruments are important, and most of his instrumental music has been written for the flute. The glissandos, extreme dynamics and free rhythm of Mei are derived from the characteristic music of the shakuhachi, the end-blown Japanese flute. Mei is the Chinese character meaning obscure, pale, intangible. The sound of the flute, according to ancient Japanese belief, has the power to reach the dead.
This summer at Tanglewood I heard a concert of gagaku, the ancient, ritualistic, highly stylized court music of Japan. This music proceeds at a vastly slower pace than we are accustomed to in European art music. After an initial skepticism I--and, judging by the rapt silence in Ozawa Hall, the great majority of the audience--found the music serene, entrancing, and deeply moving. This experience piqued my interest in the American composer Morton Feldman, whose music owes nothing to gagaku, but shares its expansiveness (the timings of some of Feldman's late works are in hours, not minutes) and its mesmerizing allure.
The post-war years spawned a host of American innovators, individualists, and iconoclasts, including composers Cage, Harrison, Nancarrow, and Feldman. Feldman was typical of this group in that, although he had studied composition with Riegger and Wolpe, he was influenced far more by such extra-musical stimuli as the abstract expressionism of Rauschenberg, Pollock, and Rothko, or in the case of Why Patterns?, by Near and Middle Eastern rugs.
Why Patterns? consists almost entirely of isolated tones and brief riffs for the three instruments. There are no dynamic markings and no expression indications. Only at the very end is there precise coördination between the instruments. There are no tunes, there is no intentional counterpoint, there is no discernible form or harmonic organization. One might ask, then, whether this is music--just as many asked, in the 1950s, whether the work of the artists named above is art.
The stuff that Why Patterns? does consist of is patterns. Each instrumental part consists of meticulously notated patterns of pitches and rhythms that perpetually metamorphose and recombine, sometimes subtly, sometimes perceptibly, sometimes abruptly. The instruments--flute, doubling alto flute and bass flute; piano, and glockenspiel--have vividly differentiated timbres that lend the three parts a crystalline clarity. The intertwining progress of the patterns invites active listening; the passive listener may find other rewards in the surface beauty of the music, its slow pace and quiet voice. Feldman cites Rauschenberg's discovery that he wanted "neither life not art, but something in between."
A commentator observed in 1695 that "every composer in Paris . . . was madly writing sonatas in the Italian manner." This was in response to the triosonatas of Corelli, with their developed contrapuntal textures and infectious energy. In his preface to Les goûts-réünis (The Styles United) Couperin explains how he combined, with admirable neutrality, the best of the French and Italian traditions. One aspect of French practice he retained in Ritratto dell'amore (Portrait of Love) is the lending of descriptive titles to the movements. The English equivalents are all recognizable despite the archaic French spelling, except La noble fierté --Noble Pride.
Bach's Sonata in A major is a triosonata--a designation referring not to the number of players, but to the number of parts: the flute and the two hands at the keyboard are equal partners in a three-part contrapuntal dialogue. The sonata has survived only in truncated form--some 35 bars are missing from the manuscript of the first movement. Various editors have composed various bridges across this gap; John Gibbons and I have opted for Hans Eppstein's solution, published by Henle. His bridge has the virtue of brevity, and it camouflages itself as well as any. It permits us to enjoy, in three-movement form, a sonata by Bach at the height of his powers--than which no more need be said.
--Fenwick Smith
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