Previous Editions
First Edition: Stillness
Performance at the Lilypad in Cambridge, MA March 15, 2017
Three of tonight’s works were commissioned for this very concert and grew out of a prompt we sent to the three composers (Coleman Zurkowski, Julian Pozniak, and Henri Colombat). Our prompt asked the composers to consider Schubert’s obsession with sound in itself, with repetition of great blocks of similarly-textured music, with a kind of non-development that is so special to Schubert’s music (vs., say, the highly directional, energetic, developmental, at-the- edge-of-exploding rhetoric of a Beethoven or Strauss). After gathering the commissioned works and deciding to include music of a similar spirit from Glass, Satie, and Chopin, we arrived at a word we hope will include in its many shades of meaning these peculiar characteristics. And so we arrived at “stillness,” and at tonight’s program. Devised in four parts, the last three sections of the program elaborate on the different perspectives on stillness that each of the pieces in first part lays out.
Part I: Exposition...
In the first part of the program, we wish to present three types of stillness—preceded by Zurkowski’s First Through-Composed Harmony, a sort of aural calibration. The Schubert sonata which follows is obsessive, dark, and stuck: consider the unannounced return of the main theme throughout the sonata, which snaps us back with almost cinematic force into a world of introspective anxiety. Then consider Glass’s altogether different use of repetition and return: he creates a neutral world of stillness, one in which our thoughts and emotions are free to swim in any direction. Finally, in Schubert’s first Musical Moment, we encounter a world by turns playful and peaceful, in which recolored returns and grand repetitions cast a glow of loving and generous stillness over the sound-world of the piece.
Part II: Dark...
Satie’s 4th Gnossienne suggests to us a world of pungent still water, a world of griminess, both physical and psychological. The left hand crawls while the right hand murmurs above, half-putting- on-mask, half-belching, full-ennui. Remarkably, Satie achieves much of this introspective darkness, like Schubert, through monochromatic texture and repetition. Julian Pozniak’s commissioned sonata (preceded by a rumbling Through-Composed Harmony) borrows from Schubert a certain type of obsession with blocks of similarly-textured music. We hear in his piece a continuous desire to escape these tense worlds: and towards the end, with the return of the main theme in Beethovenian triumph, we do escape. But in a very Schubertian twist, the music returns in anguish and defeat to its initial quietness, and so shares in the spirit of the Schubert sonata with which we opened the program.
Part III: Neutral...
Zurkowski’s arch-neutral Through-Composed Harmonies reach even further than Glass in their openness, their ability to reflect the wandering imagination. These pieces defy any explanation and inevitably require the listener to come face to face with the primacy of sound. Henri Colombat’s “un tableau d’un bête musicale” is, for all it’s searching, quite a playful piece. Colombat opens the piece with an abstraction of his final theme, centered on two triads and borrowing songful material directly from Schubert’s Musical Moments. After 19 measures of this, Colombat begins a series of episodes punctuated by explosive climaxes. These episodes whittle away excess tones and rhythmic material so that after 71 measures, the fully rendered theme reappears. So we look into the studio of the composer at work, picking and choosing, dropping and adding, and arriving back where he started. It is a piece focused on process and not, like much of the rest of the program, on any kind of psychological trauma or joy. In this material excitement, and this absence of psychological searching, we find a kind of neutral stillness—a kind of stillness that is of kindred spirit with that of Satie’s first Sarabande, in which airy snippets come and go, in which we can soberly watch the trees and the grass as they sway in evening light…