Carter's Symphonia is Best Experienced with Your Eyes Closed
[largely composed on steno pad during late-night Metro North ride on Saturday]
The Juilliard Orchestra provides one of the best classical listening experiences in New York -- the kids play with fierce commitment (and they're talented, a fractional notch beneath a full-time big city orchestra), the halls at Juilliard are more intimate, and the crowds tend to be more interested and tuned in. Plus, most of their concerts are free, like this one tonight, which had James Levine conducting Charles Ives's Three Places in New England and two substantial Elliott Carter works. (This was the end of a span of Carter concerts that constituted Juilliard's "FOCUS!" festival this year.) This was pretty much a must-see for me; especially to get two Carter works on one program. These were his Cello Concerto (from 2000) and, most excitingly, his three-movement Symphonia, which he composed in the mid-1990s. Carter, alive and well, is 99 this year; he's written a mind-boggling amount of top-shelf music is his old age, and in an exceedingly complex language to boot.
(The free ticket, incidentally, involved spending a half hour in an outdoor standby line in the freezing cold between 6:30 and 7:00. No carping from me about that: I would do the same thing tonight, if I could, if the concert was on again and the Super Bowl wasn't. The standby ticket wasn't a guaranteed admission, so I also wandered across the plaza to purchase another $12 rush ticket to the Berio/Sinfonia concert, figuring I'd reattend that if I got turned away from Carter. I thought of it as a reasonably priced Atonal Orchestra Music insurance policy.)
I hadn't actually seen Levine conduct before; he sits high up on a chair (due to health problems that are periodically remarked on in the press, but that remain obscure) and looks over a score on the stand like he's consulting a ledger, while directing the orchestra in fluid motions with his bare hands.
Three Places was amazing, exuding humanity and textural sumptuousness, not to mention highlighting some heroic brass playing. (This is a piece that will make you take notice if your seat is in the direct line of fire of the trombone section.) That humanity actually made the Cello Concerto something of a shock -- despite a lyrical (though still atonal) solo part (performed by the young cellist Dane Johansen) this is a thorny, severe piece, with the orchestra throwing dissonant punches at the soloist or slashing away with brutal chordal material. After the Ives this seemed harshly lit and anti-emotional -- even the violence in it seemed to be held at a remove, like the work wasn't expressing violence so much as abstractly discussing the idea of violence. Meanwhile, the fleeting instrumental correspondences that typify all of Carter's work -- the constant interplay or mutual interruptions by soloists or ad-hoc choirs -- seemed a lot less effective in the orchestral setting than I expected. This came as a surprise. In the only other substantial Carter concert I've heard, a 2003 one-evening traversal of his six string quartets by the Pacifica Quartet, the opportunity to watch the players keyed the music for me, really to the point of revelation. Here, the visuals were working in the opposite direction.
So, during Symphonia, I started listening with my eyes closed, and boy, this makes a difference with Carter. The image of the orchestra onstage is static, literal, and coloristically limited; Carter's music jumps off of it kind of like an invisible candle flame. I found that without any of that visual dead weight the sounds were a much more vivid experience; it was easier to make the usual pseudo-synaesthetic connections between music and suggestions of color, texture, weight, fluidity, depth of field, and so forth.
(Mandy, actually, had planted the seed for this idea for me last week, by calling to enthuse about another Juilliard/Carter concert [one conducted by Boulez, actually] and noting how she found she needed to listen with her eyes closed. So, chalk up another point for staying on good terms with the ex-girlfriend.)
Symphonia's first movement is an angular, punchy Partita, a good specimen of aggressive modernism but nothing unforgettable. But the second and third movements (Adagio Tenebroso, Allegro Scorrevole) ascend to a way higher level, to that point where you realize there just isn't any other music that sounds at all like it. There's a tender but completely unsentimentalized emotional sweep at play here, and harmonies that are still complex but laced with just a touch of sweetness. (One of the beauties of predominantly dissonant music is that composers can synthesize unexpected consonances out of it.) Much of the Adagio is shaped out of rich, overlapping washes of sound, with a subtle but powerful, oceanic pull; a subtle natural force you have to search your way towards and admit into your senses. It's an elegiac movement, but even in its sterner outbursts there's an embracing goodness to it: not Ives's humanity, exactly, but something believable that seems to reflect well on us all.
The Allegro is one of the more impressive ten-minute stretches of intentional sound you'll ever get to hear. Carter's subtitle for the Symphonia, sum fluxae pretieum spei, refers to a Latin poem by the 17th-century English poet Richard Crashaw that finds metaphor in the existence of a floating bubble. The Allegro is Carter's bubble music, and he aptly creates a swift, airy, and very touching poetry for it. The instrumental textures do amazing things with the harmony; "tonal" and "atonal" don't feel like relevant terms to these sounds, and it barely registers as what you'd usually call music. (With eyes closed, again, it feels like you're trying to employ a sensory apparatus you didn't know you had.) A pattering nature-world is in it, too, with chattery wind solos and even the occasional woodpeckering woodblock. At the end the texture gets brassy and heavier, then lightens and tapers to a final piccolo solo. (I think. Maybe flute? I don't remember now.) Whatever it is, it's a very satisfying conclusion.
(There's a really excellent recording of this piece, by the way, paired with Carter's Clarinet Concerto. And not like this should influence any purchasing decisions, but that CD has some of the better cover/packaging design I've seen.)
The eyes-closed listening made this all a bit sad, though, too, like the feelings involved (though vivid) were tenuous and elusive; at the end of the concert I felt a sense of loss, like the show was over and the feeling of the music was going to be gone. But then you step out into the street and hear the late-night traffic whisking by, and the people who are out, and you get the tactile feeling of the wind and also of the street punctuating up through your footsteps; and you realize your brain is synthesizing all this information differently, beautifully so, for having just listened to Carter's Symphonia. And that's the irreplaceable strength in this music -- that it resonates with the experience of living in the world, strongly enough to echo back into that experience, at least for a few minutes. And frankly, that echo provides a temporary illusion of there being a higher organization to things that's way more convincing than anything anyone's ever said to me about religion.
The Juilliard Orchestra provides one of the best classical listening experiences in New York -- the kids play with fierce commitment (and they're talented, a fractional notch beneath a full-time big city orchestra), the halls at Juilliard are more intimate, and the crowds tend to be more interested and tuned in. Plus, most of their concerts are free, like this one tonight, which had James Levine conducting Charles Ives's Three Places in New England and two substantial Elliott Carter works. (This was the end of a span of Carter concerts that constituted Juilliard's "FOCUS!" festival this year.) This was pretty much a must-see for me; especially to get two Carter works on one program. These were his Cello Concerto (from 2000) and, most excitingly, his three-movement Symphonia, which he composed in the mid-1990s. Carter, alive and well, is 99 this year; he's written a mind-boggling amount of top-shelf music is his old age, and in an exceedingly complex language to boot.
(The free ticket, incidentally, involved spending a half hour in an outdoor standby line in the freezing cold between 6:30 and 7:00. No carping from me about that: I would do the same thing tonight, if I could, if the concert was on again and the Super Bowl wasn't. The standby ticket wasn't a guaranteed admission, so I also wandered across the plaza to purchase another $12 rush ticket to the Berio/Sinfonia concert, figuring I'd reattend that if I got turned away from Carter. I thought of it as a reasonably priced Atonal Orchestra Music insurance policy.)
I hadn't actually seen Levine conduct before; he sits high up on a chair (due to health problems that are periodically remarked on in the press, but that remain obscure) and looks over a score on the stand like he's consulting a ledger, while directing the orchestra in fluid motions with his bare hands.
Three Places was amazing, exuding humanity and textural sumptuousness, not to mention highlighting some heroic brass playing. (This is a piece that will make you take notice if your seat is in the direct line of fire of the trombone section.) That humanity actually made the Cello Concerto something of a shock -- despite a lyrical (though still atonal) solo part (performed by the young cellist Dane Johansen) this is a thorny, severe piece, with the orchestra throwing dissonant punches at the soloist or slashing away with brutal chordal material. After the Ives this seemed harshly lit and anti-emotional -- even the violence in it seemed to be held at a remove, like the work wasn't expressing violence so much as abstractly discussing the idea of violence. Meanwhile, the fleeting instrumental correspondences that typify all of Carter's work -- the constant interplay or mutual interruptions by soloists or ad-hoc choirs -- seemed a lot less effective in the orchestral setting than I expected. This came as a surprise. In the only other substantial Carter concert I've heard, a 2003 one-evening traversal of his six string quartets by the Pacifica Quartet, the opportunity to watch the players keyed the music for me, really to the point of revelation. Here, the visuals were working in the opposite direction.
So, during Symphonia, I started listening with my eyes closed, and boy, this makes a difference with Carter. The image of the orchestra onstage is static, literal, and coloristically limited; Carter's music jumps off of it kind of like an invisible candle flame. I found that without any of that visual dead weight the sounds were a much more vivid experience; it was easier to make the usual pseudo-synaesthetic connections between music and suggestions of color, texture, weight, fluidity, depth of field, and so forth.
(Mandy, actually, had planted the seed for this idea for me last week, by calling to enthuse about another Juilliard/Carter concert [one conducted by Boulez, actually] and noting how she found she needed to listen with her eyes closed. So, chalk up another point for staying on good terms with the ex-girlfriend.)
Symphonia's first movement is an angular, punchy Partita, a good specimen of aggressive modernism but nothing unforgettable. But the second and third movements (Adagio Tenebroso, Allegro Scorrevole) ascend to a way higher level, to that point where you realize there just isn't any other music that sounds at all like it. There's a tender but completely unsentimentalized emotional sweep at play here, and harmonies that are still complex but laced with just a touch of sweetness. (One of the beauties of predominantly dissonant music is that composers can synthesize unexpected consonances out of it.) Much of the Adagio is shaped out of rich, overlapping washes of sound, with a subtle but powerful, oceanic pull; a subtle natural force you have to search your way towards and admit into your senses. It's an elegiac movement, but even in its sterner outbursts there's an embracing goodness to it: not Ives's humanity, exactly, but something believable that seems to reflect well on us all.
The Allegro is one of the more impressive ten-minute stretches of intentional sound you'll ever get to hear. Carter's subtitle for the Symphonia, sum fluxae pretieum spei, refers to a Latin poem by the 17th-century English poet Richard Crashaw that finds metaphor in the existence of a floating bubble. The Allegro is Carter's bubble music, and he aptly creates a swift, airy, and very touching poetry for it. The instrumental textures do amazing things with the harmony; "tonal" and "atonal" don't feel like relevant terms to these sounds, and it barely registers as what you'd usually call music. (With eyes closed, again, it feels like you're trying to employ a sensory apparatus you didn't know you had.) A pattering nature-world is in it, too, with chattery wind solos and even the occasional woodpeckering woodblock. At the end the texture gets brassy and heavier, then lightens and tapers to a final piccolo solo. (I think. Maybe flute? I don't remember now.) Whatever it is, it's a very satisfying conclusion.
(There's a really excellent recording of this piece, by the way, paired with Carter's Clarinet Concerto. And not like this should influence any purchasing decisions, but that CD has some of the better cover/packaging design I've seen.)
The eyes-closed listening made this all a bit sad, though, too, like the feelings involved (though vivid) were tenuous and elusive; at the end of the concert I felt a sense of loss, like the show was over and the feeling of the music was going to be gone. But then you step out into the street and hear the late-night traffic whisking by, and the people who are out, and you get the tactile feeling of the wind and also of the street punctuating up through your footsteps; and you realize your brain is synthesizing all this information differently, beautifully so, for having just listened to Carter's Symphonia. And that's the irreplaceable strength in this music -- that it resonates with the experience of living in the world, strongly enough to echo back into that experience, at least for a few minutes. And frankly, that echo provides a temporary illusion of there being a higher organization to things that's way more convincing than anything anyone's ever said to me about religion.
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