Kosmogonia

Notes by Dean Suzuki 

Victoria Jordanova, an American composer born in Kragujevac, Serbia, is probably best known for her magnificent Requiem for Bosnia for broken piano, harp, and child’s voice. The current CD is her first for piano since the release of the Requiem in 1994. Unlike the Requiem, which exists only as a recording and cannot be performed live (the namesake broken piano no longer exists), Kosmogonia is comprised of works that can be performed in concert.

Born in Serbia, a longtime San Francisco resident, and now living in Los Angeles, Jordanova’s aesthetic predecessors include West Coast American experimentalists and mavericks Henry Cowell and John Cage. She is inspired by their innovative piano compositions, and especially by Cowell’s “string piano” (when performers bypass the piano’s keyboard and play directly on the strings, variously plucking, strumming, rubbing, and otherwise manipulating them), as well as his generous use of tone clusters; and Cage’s “prepared piano,” inspired by and extrapolated from Cowell’s string piano, in which items such as screws, bolts, bits of rubber and other materials are inserted and wedged between the strings, thus dramatically transforming the instrument’s timbre.

It should be no surprise that other important influences on Jordanova include Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti, both composers who experimented with and explored sound masses, unorthodox timbres, and unconventional musical textures and techniques. In an undergraduate class taught by composition professor Dr. Jere Hutcheson, Jordanova encountered Penderecki’s Kosmogonia (1970) (a work that inspired her own work of the same title found on this CD), Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) and Ligeti’s Atmospheres (1961).

Such inspiration is borne out when Jordanova states that she uses a computer and MIDI instruments to compose, “But whenever I really want to test an idea, only the piano will do. I open it, knock on it, touch every part of it, play it inside and out, amplify it to hear its softest whispers, and present it with all kinds of toys and devices to coax every possible sound out of it. And it always gives back more than I expect, surprising me with new sounds and possibilities.”

Jordanova’s wide-open ears are on a never-ending quest for new sounds, timbres, and sonorities. She says, “Some of the best times of my life were spent with pianos. I have played many pianos in my life, and I’ve never found one I didn’t like. From the old upright, which never could be tuned properly, that I rescued from a local bar and worked on in my Manhattan apartment to the one that fell two flights of stairs in the French-American International School in San Francisco, which I used to record my Requiem—all gave me something unique. Sometimes I feel that there is more at play than a mere material object, as in the medieval concept of anima mundi–a pure, ethereal spirit diffused throughout all nature that animates all matter in the same sense in which the soul was thought to animate the human.” She concludes with a rather cunning and insightful proposal: “Maybe the piano participates in my compositions as much as I do.”

In her Sonatina no. 1 for upright antique piano, Jordanova coaxes beautiful sounds from an instrument that would have horrified Chopin and would be considered beneath contempt by contemporary concert pianists. Instead of regarding the faults of the antique piano as shortcomings, she views them as opportunities for sonic exploration. Indeed, Sonatina no. 1 would be a completely different and much less successful work was it played on a pristine concert grand.

Those familiar with the string piano and prepared piano, and with works by composers such as Stephen Scott who also use extended techniques on the instrument, including “bowing” the strings (for example, strands of rosined nylon fishing line are threaded under the strings then drawn back and forth to excite the series), will recognize the instrument as a piano but may be bewildered by the manner of sound generation in Genesis and Kosmogonia. These compositions require a vibrating glove, in which small electromagnets are placed on the fingertips. Jordanova does not insert her hand in the glove to stroke or massage the strings. Instead, she uses the glove as a holder for the electromagnets, placed directly on the strings. Further manipulation, including using the keyboard, sustaining pedal, and touching the string with the fingers, change the overtone structure to discover new timbres and advance the music.

The amplification employed in several works on this CD is used only to precisely reveal the subtleties and nuances of the piano rather than to increase power and volume. By running the sound from the microphone directly into the computer input, the typical recording studio problems of capturing acoustic sound accurately are circumvented. The amplification and recording techniques allow the listener to hear everything–harmonics, partials, and other acoustic phenomena–in a way that would not be possible using traditional recording methods. As a result, one hears the music differently and in a way that enhances Jordanova’s compositions and reveals her extraordinary gifts.

— Dean Suzuki

Associate Professor of music history at San Francisco State University and producer and host of “Discreet Music” on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, CA.