I.
After spending so many evenings on the deck, when it’s raining and I can’t linger out there, I feel surprisingly boxed in. It’s been raining about 80% of the time for the last two days, but it was clear enough last night to get in some high-quality deck-sittin’ with my temp-roommate Judith and her boyfriend. Some kind of conversation concerning libertarianism and the theory behind housing regulations accompanied the proceedings, as well as some brownies Judith made.
Shortly after, and even better: listening alone to the veiled treetop scrape of crickets (to my right), the quiet clatter of dishes being done (to my left), and the imagined slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto (at center, and confined to the space inside my head, as it turns out. I have never paid attention to the actual apparent spatial location of imagined music before, but I guess this makes sense.) This was a pleasant kind of trio.
II.
Today after a quick lunch (and during one of the many spates of rain) I stopped in the music library to try to find something on CD by James Tenney, an apparent beacon to academic and experimental composers who I had not heard of before he
passed away this week. There wasn’t much there, but I got a listen in to his "Water on the Mountain . . . Fire in Heaven" for six electric guitars. Not what you'd expect from the ensemble, not aggressive at all: very pontillistic, built on many many clipped single notes in complex counterpoint.
In the
recording, it’s one electric guitarist putting down six tracks, or probably twelve: the piece is built on each guitar part containing two staves; the first and second movements feature the top and bottom staves of each part, respectively; the third movement combines everything. If this sounds kind of academic/thinky-music to you, you would be correct. Additionally, each of the guitars is tuned to a different harmonic scheme (I know not what, exactly) so when each part is plinking away its series of isolated notes in complex rhythms, it comes off as a sort of a slow procession of crippled metallic overtones.
After about twelve minutes of this I’d finally fixed on the mental image that allowed me to start enjoying the experience – I find I can come up with a satisfying image with increasing facility, and sometimes this will actually snap a piece I don’t like into one that I do. Here it was the idea of staring at a giant abstract mobile with stainless steel panel-appendages, watching the parts drift and slowly oscillate. I started to think this might be a good piece to listen to while wandering around
Storm King for a while: sharing some kind of kindred spirit with all those Mark Di Suvero sculptures.
But I still was not sold on the piece, and I would have stopped listening if Tenney hadn’t just died. I figured I could give the man that much.
But then, the third movement: everything together turns out to create a detectable expressive line, but one with an effect that I have not felt from any piece of music before: that expressive line was invisible, inferred from the many separate notes, more a compositional center of gravity (to channel a
Dennett-related analogy) than a stream of consciousness. The harmony, meanwhile, coalesces into something tangible but fragile, like the spectrum of color on dark oil slick. All those diffuse and mistuned dissonances are suddenly little shards of light, glinting off a dark and invisible, complex whole.
And this reminded me all of a sudden of watching the little multifaceted glass ball that used to hang from the window in our grandparents’ living room: a certain quality of light and suspended daytime and being alone, and spinning that little ball around to throw little bitty rainbows over the white walls, and being transfixed by this. The image itself is known to be a memory; in the memory no one else is in that house, and it feels very empty. The window itself is bright white, and I don’t know what’s past it. I don’t know what the connection between the music and the image is. The music feels very dark, the image feels very light.
So that, in my own corner of the world, is the music of James Tenney. May he rest in peace.
III.
Later in the afternoon I listened to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto while molding a word file of book jacket copy into its properly templated shape, and I remembered that this piece, too, reminds me of our grandparents’ house, though the subsequent house. I listened to this piece for the first time (at age 16 or 17) on their stereo, sitting on the floor wearing big cushioned headphones, after a family dinner but before our younger cousins had been released into the living room. And the thrill of hearing the Big Melody in the first movement recapitulate so grandly, with the timpani underneath it – this actually takes me back to that point on the floor with some frequency.
I might add that the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto is very well-suited music to the kind of rainy day where it feels like 7 pm at 3:30 in the afternoon.
