Life is full of contradictions, so the saying goes. Yet art teaches us that what
appears certain actually might be contradictory, and what appears contradictory
might be resolved through a change of perspective. If life may imitate art as
much as art imitates life, let us hope that our world leaders can resolve the
contradictions in their own domain as artfully as composer Robert Morris
resolves them in his.
Morris, the chair of the Eastman
School’s Composition Department, and one of the most accomplished music
theorists in North America, hypothetically fits the profile of the “academic”
composer who writes “stuffy” music for the concert hall. Yet in Morris’s hands,
concert music can meld with the great outdoors; meticulously planned structure
can bear the spontaneity of jazz and embrace the freedom of indeterminacy; the
latest rarified developments in Western art-music can join hands with the most
ancient traditions of Eastern spiritual and musical culture. What seemed like
contradictions were actually just doors not yet opened.
Morris opened the doors between his
music and nature in Playing Outside (2001).
The piece was scored for chorus, orchestra, four improvisers, and Balinese
gamelan playing simultaneously in various Webster Park locations, as musicians
and the audience wandered around: “an experience that
merged music with walking or hiking,” Morris says.
Though Morris
spent months planning the piece, its core concept embraces the delightful
indeterminacy that nature provides. Morris, and the rest of us, could enjoy
little surprises like “hearing the birds flying overhead with a similar texture
in an ensemble piece; or the august quiet of the forest among long silences
marked only by tiny, high pizzicati in the strings; or noting the way people
attended to the music, standing and sitting in various degrees of attention.
The best thing was that all kinds of people were involved, with their kids and
pets, as well as people who came to hear music.”
This Sunday
afternoon, musicians
from several other cities converge in Rochester to perform a concert of
Morris’s recent works. Each musician has a specific relationship to Morris and
his music.
Pianist Fang-Tzu
Liu flies in from Taiwan to perform the world premiere of Meandering River. When presented with the work, Fan-Tzu told Morris
she found the title fitting “since she had many dreams about a flowing, sinuous
river as a child. Later, as she was learning it, she remarked how the piece
seemed strangely connected to her personality, even though she has never played
anything quite like it.”
Marianne
Gythfeldt comes from New York City to perform the world premiere of On the Go, for clarinet and
computer-generated sounds. “Marianne is now one of
the most advanced performers of new music in the States,” Morris says. In On the Go (the second work Morris has
composed for Gythfeldt), the computer sounds act as a “virtual
orchestra” that “generalizes the clarinet’s timbre.” The concept is similar to
that of Morris’s guitar and computer sound piece To the Nine, which is available on a CD entitled Sheer Pluck (CRI) performed by Todd
Seelye. The computer sounds in To the
Nine turn the classical guitar from a gentle lamb of an instrument into a
dynamic pouncing tiger of sound colors. If Onthe Go is anything like it, it won’t
disappoint.
Piano and
percussion duo Paul Hoffman and Tom Goldstein are coming from Maryland to
perform the world premiere of Struck
Sound. “I wrote Struck Sound for
the Hoffman/Goldstein Duo after hearing them play an amazing concert of new
music. I went up to them immediately afterwards and told them how much I had
enjoyed their performances, and they hinted that they would be interested in my
writing a piece for them. Immediately I got to work and presented it to them a
few months later. I wasn’t sure they’d like the work or even accept it, but
they dove right in and began rehearsals.” Both the title and the rhythms of Struck Sound are inspired by Indian
music, which Morris has studied for over 40 years.
Members of the Lithium Saxophone
Quartet, based in Chicago and Missouri, will perform Bob’s Bop. Says Morris: “You can hear
this piece in many ways, and the title suggests that listening to it as related
to the jazz tradition is appropriate. It has the gesture, swing, and wildness
of free jazz, and also the flow that underlies the impulsive qualities of that
music. Many of my friends are jazz players. I love bebop and free jazz and the
use of the saxophone in that music. The ways in which jazz artists interact in
improvisation as well as in ‘big band’ ensembles has been an inspiration in all
my music.”
Members of Lithium will also perform
Vibhatsa, which is inspired by Indian aesthetic theory and
composed in 1978. “The late ’70s were a time of
despair for many of us who lived through the artistic idealism of the 1960s and
early 1970s… But there was also a growing awareness that Western classical
music was among other sophisticated musics in many different times and places,
and this was exhilarating.”
Four Zen poems posing metaphysical
riddles are scrambled up to form the text of Sung Song, a work Morris wrote at the request of singer Heather
Gardner, who will perform it unaccompanied. “Sung Song is refreshingly pleasant to
sing,” says Gardner. “There is a great deal of recent vocal music that is
difficult to sing because the composer doesn’t understand the voice and demands
things that, while perhaps possible, are not necessarily comfortable. This
piece, however, is one of the more comfortable pieces that I have performed
recently.”
Those who can’t wait until Sunday’s
concert might listen to Morris’s Moteton Doo-dah, (on the New World Records
CD New Music For Virtuosos). In
typical Morris fashion, it combines such diverse elements as Stephen Foster’s
“Camptown Races,” Medieval French motet structure, and Korean Ah-Ak court music into a unified whole:
Still a riddle perhaps, but no longer a contradiction.
A concert of
recent works by Robert Morris, Sunday, March 2, at Eastman School of
Music’s Kilbourn Hall, 26 Gibbs Street, at 3 p.m. Tix: $5 at the door only,
free to UR ID holders and Eastman Series subscribers. 274-1100.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2003.
