New York Love Songs
Jenny Q Chai — piano and voiceWorks by John Cage, Charles Ives, Victoria Jordanova, Frederic Rzewski and Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang
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Jenny Q Chai plays the part of both pianist and vocalist throughout this recording. A conceptual album dedicated to the avant-garde reinterpretation of the solo pianist-vocalist genre, with Victoria Jordanova’s song cycle New York Love Songs as the title work. It opens with songs by John Cage, Charles Ives and Frederic Rzewski, presented here as a miniature apotheosis of each composer’s style, and also spotlights the young composer Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang, completing Jordanova’s curatorial vision of a melting pot of forward-thinking artists in tune with the spirit of New York City.
Tracks
The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs John CageSerenity Charles IvesMarriage (Mile 58), Section F, from The Road Frederic RzewskiIntimate Rejection Ashley Fu-Tsun WangNew York Love Songs Victoria JordanovaPrayer · Bite · Chinese Laundry Across the Street · MoonLoveling Victoria Jordanova
- Catalogue number
- AV 003CD
- Released
- 26 August, 2010
- Format
- CD · digital
- Mastering
- Acmastering, Montreal
- Duration
- 40 minutes
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 the discovery of a brilliant and fearless young performer, Jenny Q Chai, a former student of the pianist Anthony de Mare. She has pioneered a practice as both keyboardist and vocalist. Chai continues this new tradition within classical music, one which looks like the most obvious and natural thing 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, and 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 own 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. It is one of the first pieces to use the piano purely as unpitched percussion, but then that is not surprising from a composer who three years later wrote 4’33”, a work in which 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 and 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 The 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, 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 New York was the sculpture that dominates a corner of 6th Avenue in Manhattan: Robert Indiana’s LOVE.
Each song 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 Teresa. 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 piano 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 eleventh-century poem in Chinese. The song was written as an addition to the original cycle, at 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 they have experienced an intense yet gentle, even seductive encounter with a series of unique creative spirits.
— Robert Carl
Chair of composition at the Hartt School, University of Hartford, and author of Terry Riley’s In C (Oxford University Press).
First prize winner of the Keys to the Future Contemporary Solo Piano Festival, and recipient of the DAAD Arts and Performance award in 2010, Jenny Q Chai is an active pianist specializing in contemporary music. Chai has premiered, most notably, Life Sketches by Nils Vigeland, Exercise in Deism by John Slover, Intimate Rejection by Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang, and Blue Inscription by Scott Wollschleger. She has also premiered Marriage (Mile 58), Section F from The Road by Frederic Rzewski in Ghent, Belgium, where she was given the Logos Award for the best revelation performance of 2008. Chai introduced the concept of prepared piano to a Chinese audience with the world premiere of Mallet Dance by John Slover at Shanghai Concert Hall.
Under her mother’s tutelage, Chai began playing the piano at the age of three. By age six, she was selected out of thousands of applicants by the Shanghai Music Conservatory to be one of eleven piano students. At thirteen, she began studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, accompanied by her father, the sculptor Biao Chai, to study under the Beethoven specialist Seymour Lipkin.
Four years later, Chai began to question whether music was her path. Two dark years followed, in which she avoided the piano. Then, by chance, the summer before her final year at Curtis, she heard a recording of Chopin playing in the background at a Shanghai tea house. The tears gushed out of my eyes like an unexpected summer storm, says Chai. That was when I knew I wanted to be a pianist. She practiced relentlessly to return to Curtis and graduated as a more mature and vibrant artist.
Yearning for something beyond the standard classical repertoire, Chai found a mentor in Nils Vigeland, chair of composition at the Manhattan School of Music, under whose support her long-held affinity for contemporary music was able to bloom. Receiving a full scholarship, she studied for her Master’s degree under the pedagogue Solomon Mikowsky at the Manhattan School of Music. For her doctoral studies, also at MSM, she made the bold decision to play only contemporary music, under the guidance of the pianist Anthony de Mare. De Mare premiered Victoria Jordanova’s Prayer from New York Love Songs, later introducing the piece to Chai. A recording of Chai’s performance inspired Jordanova to invite her to collaborate on this album.
Chai has worked with the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard and performed in Ensemble 20/21, directed by David Smeyers, and with Musikfabrik. She has been written about in major media throughout the United States, China, and Europe, including Time Out New York, Shanghai Culture, and Cologne Daily News, and her contemporary music performances have been broadcast in Italy, Germany, China, and the United States.
For Chai, near-total immersion in the contemporary music world has only enhanced her appreciation for the classical repertoire. I feel a sense of contentment programming creative concerts, mixing and matching old and new works to highlight what is most special in each piece. After all, nothing comes from nothing, and new music is very much connected to that which came before.
Chai is music director of the contemporary lecture series Ear to Mind in New York City and founder of the FaceArt Music and Arts Center in Shanghai.
John Cage
The legendary American composer, pianist, philosopher, poet, and mycologist was a 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 in 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. Roaratorio, 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, 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
Composer, pianist, and organist, Ives is widely regarded as the foremost American composer of international significance. He combined the American popular and church music traditions of his youth with European art music. He was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the twentieth century. In 1906, Ives composed what some have argued was the first radical musical work of the century, Central Park in the Dark, a piece which evokes an evening by comparing sounds from nearby nightclubs in Manhattan with orchestral strings depicting the mysterious dark and misty qualities of the Central Park woods.
Although Ives is famous today for his orchestral music, string quartets, and other chamber works, during his life he worked and made a fortune in the life insurance business, composing music and working as an organist in his spare time. In 1922 he self-published his 114 Songs, a collection which shows the breadth of his work as a composer. In 1947 his obscurity was lifted when his Symphony No. 3 won him the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Ives was also a great supporter of twentieth-century music and works written by other composers, and 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, 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 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 new works for traditional harp with different electronic modules applied to each piece. Her 2004 Outer Circles is a sound sculpture for sampled vocal, acoustic and environmental sounds, published by Innova Recordings. In 2003 she received a San Francisco Arts Commission grant for the multidisciplinary work Panopticon. Her music for chamber ensembles has been performed by the California EAR Unit, Zeitgeist, Bang on a Can All Stars, CurvdAir, and Creative Voices. Her music was included in The Composer-Performer: 40 Years of Discovery, Composers Recordings Inc.’s 40th anniversary anthology of American music, in 1994.
Frederic Rzewski
Composer, pianist, and conductor, Rzewski 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 work in live electronics and improvisation. Combining classical and jazz avant-gardists such as Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton, MEV developed an aesthetic 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 fifty-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 finds a freer, more spontaneous approach to writing. His largest-scale work to date is The Triumph of Death (1987–88), 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 eight-hour work for solo piano divided into eight parts and 64 miles, was premiered at the Trinity School of Music Rzewski Festival in London in 2006.
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 Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium, and lectures in schools and universities throughout the United States and Europe. In 2007 he published Nonsequiturs: Writings and Lectures on Improvisation, Composition, and Interpretation 1965–1994 (Edition MusikTexte, Cologne).
Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang
Wang 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 United States, Europe, and Asia by ensembles and performers such as the Brooklyn Rider String Quartet, the pianists Eric Huebner, Vicky Chow and Jenny Q Chai, and the conductors David Gilbert, Brad Lubman, and Paul Chiang, at venues including the Atlantic Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Roulette, The Stone, the Gershwin Hotel, the Logos Foundation in Belgium, Herz-Jesu-Kirche in Germany, Kitara Hall in Japan, Forum Music Hall in Taiwan, and Bach Hall in Taiwan.
Wang’s compositions have been reviewed by Allan Kozinn in the New York Times, broadcast on Taukay Edizioni Musicali in Italy, and recognized by the American Composers Forum, the ASCAP Foundation, the Award of Literature and Art Competition, the Margaret Blackburn Biennial Composition Competition, and the National Association of Composers. Her works have been performed at June in Buffalo, the Pacific Music Festival, the Festival of Women Composers, the Tutti New Music Festival, the Bang on a Can Music Festival, and the Society of Composers National Conference, among others. She has worked with composers including 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 holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and Soochow University, and pursued a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Digital sampling, editing, and mixing by Victoria Jordanova
Intimate Rejection digital sampling by B. Destremps at the Curtis Institute of Music
Mastered by Adrian Carr at Acmastering, Montreal
Art design by Relja Penezic
Executive Producer: Relja Penezic
© Arpaviva Foundation Inc., Los Angeles, California.
