New York Love Songs

Notes by Robert Carl

Contrary to musicians ‘ assumptions, when you say “composer” to most folks, the immediate association will be to a singer-songwriter, not a Beethoven laboring away in a garret. And that’s one reason that so much of what is still called “classical” music finds itself orphaned from the public. So much of it is instrumental, acoustic, and geared toward concert presentation, with the recording as an artifact, a by-product of that event. Most listeners, accustomed to albums (and now, even more fragmentedly, downloads), find this not just antiquated but inconceivable. It’s as though the creative process was set in reverse. This situation isn’t universal; some composers continue to search for a way to make “serious” music comprehensible to a larger public while not sacrificing its great virtues on the altar of trendiness.

Victoria Jordanova is such a composer, or even better, such a [total] musician. Born and raised in Yugoslavia, she came to the US for studies in Michigan and New York and an interlude in Paris. Eventually returning to the US, she made her reputation in San Francisco and currently lives in Los Angeles. She has asserted herself as a “creative musician” on the harp from the outset. Using extended techniques, improvisation, theater, and technology, she’s created a series of pieces that explore the extremes of human experience in all its passion, darkness, and ecstasy. She’s also a committed promoter and advocate of new music, not just her own (like another great Californian predecessor, Henry Cowell). With her label ArpaViva, she’s already released music featuring a variety of composers living and dead, including the monumental Cage Postcard From Heaven. And now, she brings us something new in means but similar in spirit with this collection, New York Love Songs.

There are two stimuli for this program. One is the eponymous piece Jordanova wrote in 1997-98, from which we hear four of its six songs. The other is discovering a brilliant and fearless young performer, Jenny Q Chai, a former student of Anthony de Mare, a pianist. She has pioneered a practice as both a keyboardist and vocalist. Chai continues this new tradition within classical music, which looks like the most obvious and natural possible to those familiar with pop music.

There are several connective threads throughout this album. One, again, is the use of the pianist’s voice in every song. Chai has a pleasing approach to the instrument, terrific intonation, and great dramatic flair. She’s able to move from one state to another with seeming ease, morphing from a demonic murderer in one song to a slightly sadistic lover in another to a seraph in yet another. Her delivery is naturalistic without the artificiality of bel canto but never indulges in the sort of slurred or mumbled delivery that can often pass for “authentic” in the non-classical world.

Another connection is, of course, the theme of love. All these pieces, even the instrumental ones, deal with tenderness, passion, and sensuality. The three opening works run a gamut of expression and techniques to deliver their message, and Jordanova’s songs have a similar diversity from one to the next. A third connection is Asian: Ashley Wang is from Taiwan, Chai is Chinese, Jordanova’s songs set a classic Chinese poem, and a text about an erotic encounter in a Chinese laundry, Cage’s vocal line in its modal simplicity feels as though it’s drifted in on a breeze from the Pacific. And finally, there is technology and the way it affects presentation. In the spirit of a popular album, the voice and its balance with the piano are crafted to make a specific and different impact in each song.

Degrees of reverb, multi-tracking, delay, and equalizing all contribute to giving each track a specific timbral character that, in turn, heightens its communicative meaning. The recording is its autonomous world, and while everything that happens on it can happen in live performance, there will inevitably be differences, and that’s just fine.

The first three works are all by canonical composers, albeit from a maverick canon. John Cage’s The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs sets James Joyce as a kind of incantation, accompanied by gentle knocks on the piano’s body (one of the first pieces to use the piano purely as unpitched percussion, but then not surprising from a composer who three years later wrote 4’33”, a work where the pianist does nothing but open and close the keyboard lid three times!). It serves as a kind of prayer and blessing for all to come in the next hour. Charles Ives’ Serenity takes John Greenleaf Whittier’s religious appeal. It sets it with an “endless” ostinato on a couple of chords, an eternal rocking that only opens into a more familiar hymn-harmony at the very end. Frederic Rzewski’s “Marriage (Mile 58) Section F” is an excerpt from his mammoth ongoing piano collection The Road. With text excerpted from the Tolstoy novella Kreutzer Sonata it breathlessly dashes through the tale of a crime of passion, told from the bewildered eyes of the murderer, and strangely soliciting our compassion for him. Rzewski is exceptionally skilled in balancing voice and piano. He should be, having written perhaps the single greatest piece in the medium to date, his setting of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.

Two piano works without voice serve as interludes and bookend Jordanova’s songs. Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang’s Intimate Rejection revels in the opposites embodied in the title. The piece begins with a sudden muted attack on a melodic minor third (B-D) that becomes a simple, neutral rocking between the pitches. Filigree emerges around these isolated tones and gradually creates its own internal harmony and counterpoint. The piece feels almost like a time-lapse of a plant growing. Midway through, there are sudden attacks as in the opening, now in extremes of register. Once again, gentler material slowly asserts itself and grows richer in detail and harmony. Perhaps the icy, harsh “attack” sound and the far more delicate and more lyric melodic tendrils that constitute the piece are embodiments of the title’s two extremes.

Jordanova’s New York Love Songs don’t make any overt reference to the city, but as the composer says, “In my mind, New York is the city which combines different aspects of cultures, and is also a mélange of artistic expressions and crossovers. It is also a city of romantic love, with the music of Gershwin, Broadway musicals, jazz of the 50s, lovers walking hand in hand in Central Park, and kissing on the subway. One of the first things I saw in NY was the sculpture that dominates a corner of 6th Avenue in Manhattan: Robert “Gerry” Indiana’s ‘LOVE.'” And each song not only celebrates a different type of love and creates a specific soundworld in the process. “Prayer” sets a poem by the composer which responds to the rapture of Bernini’s Roman statue of the swooning Saint Theresa. Its simple piano accompaniment, layers of vocal lines, and multiple languages create a hush of unnerving, almost unbearable vulnerability, in tune with the statue’s blend of explicit eroticism and mysticism. “Bite” is a set of instructions from the Kama Sutra that tread the thin distinction between pleasure and pain. The insistence of both the slightly laughing, teasing vocal part and the repeated notes and jingle bells on the pianist create a sound that reminds me of the atavistic songs of Harry Partch and Meredith Monk. “Chinese Laundry Across the Street,” tells a little story of repeated encounters that the listener can assume is as innocent or wicked, as much reality or fantasy as one wishes. The interplay of clearly motivic melody with spoken narration explores a range of vocal deliveries. It reminds us of Jordanova’s roots in European expressionism (though the harmonica would not be a standard instrument in fin de siècle Vienna!). Finally, “Moon” sets Su Shi’s 11th-century poem in Chinese. The song was written as an addition to the original cycle, upon Chai’s suggestion. It bespeaks a love that languishes, lingers, and hopefully survives separation. Its sound is Asian without referencing any obvious tropes beyond elegantly shaped and refined modal lines in both voice and piano. A livelier, dancing spirit enters only near its end to suggest a happy ending to the longing.

Jordanova’s Loveling is an answer to Wang’s subtle but real dichotomies. It feels like a resolution and acceptance of tenderness and the pain it can also bring. Here we have a meditation on yearning: a slowly cycling bass line, a chaconne equally at home in the Baroque or contemporary pop, over which ever-more rich variations cast their web. The result is a nocturne, and if Chopin comes to mind, why not? This is a Slav writing, after all. One characteristic of American music, a tradition Jordanova considers an adoptive one, is a willingness to go it alone, make it up as one goes, and invent whatever means necessary to execute a vision. All the music on this disc meets those criteria. In the end, the listener feels that s/he has experienced an intense yet gentle, even seductive, encounter with a series of unique creative spirits.

Robert Carl is chair of composition at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. He is the author of Terry Riley’s In C (Oxford University Press).

John Cage

 The legendary American composer, pianist, philosopher, poet, and mycologist was the pioneer of chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments, and electronic music. Though he remains a controversial figure, he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era.

Throughout the sixties, Cage began to focus his attention on the technologies of recording and amplification. For one of his better-known pieces, Cartridge Music (1960), he amplified small household objects at a live performance. At the same time, Cage began to focus on writing and published his first book, Silence (1961). This marked a shift in his attention toward literature. With inspirations like Thoreau and Joyce, Cage began to take literary texts and transform them into music in the seventies. Roratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), was an outline for transforming any work of literature into a work of music. The piece was based on James Joyce’s novel, Finnegans Wake, which was one of Cage’s favorite books, and one from which he derived texts for several more of his works.

Cage received an award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for having extended the boundaries of music through his work with percussion orchestra and his invention of the prepared piano. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988. He was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for the 1988-89 academic year.

Charles Ives

 Composers, pianists, and organists are widely regarded as the foremost American composer of international significance. Ives combined his youth’s American popular and church-music traditions with European art music. He was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century. In 1906, Ives composed what some have argued was the first radical musical work of the twentieth century, Central Park in the Dark, the piece which evokes an evening comparing sounds from nearby nightclubs in Manhattan with the orchestral strings depicting in sound the mysterious dark and misty qualities of the Central Park woods. Although today, Ives is famous for his orchestral music, string quartets, and other works of chamber music, during his life, he worked and made a fortune in the life insurance business. He composed music and worked as an organist in his spare time. In 1922, Ives self-published his 114 Songs, the collection which shows the breadth of his work as a composer. In 1947 his obscurity was lifted when his Symphony No. 3 won Ives the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Ives was also a great supporter of twentieth-century music and works written by other composers. He was known as an accomplished pianist who could improvise in various styles, including those then quite new.

Victoria Jordanova

 Composer, harpist, and pianist, “She has a tightly controlled focus to her work, a singularity of vision” (NewMusicBox Magazine, 2005). Wishing to establish her own “sonic world” in 1993, Jordanova began to explore and use electronics as an intrinsic part of her composition process and, in 2003, founded the Arpaviva label. CRI’s recording of her Requiem For Bosnia for a broken piano, harp, and child’s voice released in the eXchange series in 1994 was named one of the top ten classical recordings by Tim Page in New York Newsday. In 1997 her Dance to Sleep album was published in CRI’s Emergency Music series featuring her new works for traditional harp with different electronic modules applied to each piece. Jordanova’s 2004 Outer Circles is a sound sculpture for sampled vocal acoustic and environmental sounds published by Innova Recordings. In 2003 Jordanova received the San Francisco Arts Commission grant for multidisciplinary work Panopticon. Jordanova’s music for chamber ensembles has been performed by the California EAR Unit, Zeitgeist, Bang on a Can All Stars, CurvdAir, Creative Voices. Her music was included in The Composer-Performer 40 Years of Discovery, Composer’s Recordings Inc. 40th Anniversary Anthology of American Music in 1994.

Frederic Rzewski

 Composer, pianist, and conductor is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde music. In Rome in the mid-sixties, together with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, he formed the MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) group, known for its pioneering live electronics and improvisation work. Combining classical and jazz avant-gardists (like Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton), MEV developed an esthetic of music as a spontaneous collective process. Many of Rzewski’s works are inspired by socio-historical themes and show a deep political conscience. During the seventies, he experimented with forms in which style and language are treated as structural elements; the best-known work of this period is The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, a 50-minute set of piano variations. Several pieces for larger ensembles written between 1979 and 1981 show a return to experimental and graphic notation, while much of the work of the eighties explores new ways of using twelve-tone technique. More recent work can find a freer, more spontaneous approach to writing. His largest-scale work to date is The Triumph of Death (1987-8), a two-hour oratorio based on texts adapted from Peter Weiss’ 1965 play Die Ermittlung (The Investigation). Highly influential both as composer and pianist, with his virtuoso De Profundis (1992) and The Road (1996-2006), Rzewski brings into the piano repertoire works that are a summation of all possible piano techniques including those which entrust the pianist with whistling, humming, talking, and percussion. The Road, a monumental ca. 8-hour long work for solo piano divided into eight Parts and 64 “Miles,” was premiered at the Trinity School of Music 2006 Rzewski Festival in London.

In 2002, Rzewski performed his works for piano on a seven-disc collection, Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works, 1975-1999, released by Nonesuch. Since 1983, he has been a Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liege, Belgium, and lectures in schools and universities throughout the U.S. and Europe. In 2007 Rzewski published his Nonsequiturs: Writings and Lectures on Improvisation, Composition, and Interpretation 1965–1994 (Edition Musiktexte, Köln 2007)

Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang

 Composer grew up in Taiwan. She began her musical training on piano and violin at the age of four and started composing at twelve. Her music has been performed throughout the US, Europe, and Asia by various ensembles and performers such as the Brooklyn Rider String Quartet, pianists Eric Huebner, Vicky Chow, Jenny Q Chai, conductors David Gilbert, Brad Lubman, and Paul Chiang, at venues including Atlantic Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Roulette, The Stone, The Gershwin Hotel, Logos Foundation (Belgium), Herz Jesu-Kirche (Germany), Kitara Hall (Japan), Forum Music Hall (Taiwan), and the Bach Hall (Taiwan). Wang’s compositions have been reviewed by Allan Kozinn in the New York Times; broadcasted on Taukay Edizioni Musicali (Italy); recognized by the American Composers Forum, ASCAP Foundation, Award of Literature and Art Competition, Margaret Blackburn Biennial Composition Competition, and National Association of Composers; and have been performed at June in Buffalo, Pacific Music Festival, Festival of Women Composers, Tutti New Music Festival, Bang on a Can Music Festival, Society of Composers National Conference, among others. She also has worked with noted composers such as David Felder, Steven Stucky, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Fabien Lévy, Michael Hersch, Nils Vigeland, Richard Danielpour, Gordon Shih-Wen Chin, and Wan-Chen Huang. Wang is currently pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and SooChow University.

Credits

Executive producer: Relja Penezic
Digital sampling, editing, and mixing by Victoria Jordanova
Intimate Rejection digital sampling by B. Destremps at Curtis Institute of Music
Mastered by Adrian Carr at Acmastering, Montreal, QC
Art Design by Relja Penezic
© Arpaviva Foundation Inc., Los Angeles, CA