CHORAL MUSIC OF DANIEL ASIA

posted by James Reel

This month we've been playing items from Daniel Asia's new choral CD. Since I wrote the liner notes for the release, I ought to share them with you here so you have a better idea of what the music's about:

Although Daniel Asia has written extensively for solo voice throughout his career, choral music has not figured prominently in his catalog. After two 1970s experiments with the timbral possibilities of massed voices (Sound Shapes and Why Jacob?), Asia produced only two choral works during the 1980s: a single movement that would later form the core of The She Set, and the more extensive Celebration for cantor and mixed ensemble (a 1988 work not included on this recording). But in the mid 1990s, between work on two major concertos and during a period otherwise largely devoted to chamber music, Asia renewed his longstanding interest in the poetry of e.e. cummings and set three groups of cummings poems for chorus. After another fallow period—only in terms of choral music; the first decade of this century has found Asia writing an abundance of chamber music—he returned to the choral genre to add material to She especially for this recording.

The two early works aside, Asia’s writing emphasizes clarity of text rather than polyphonic curlicues. The three cummings sets, in particular, are very homophonic. Asia has suggested that his approach would be quite different if he were setting familiar Mass texts, for example. “Everybody knows the components of the Mass by heart, and therefor those texts can be a vehicle for the composer to go off on musical journeys rather than actually portraying the text itself,” he says. “But with cummings, it’s not clear at all what’s being said to you. It’s only in my very early works that I de-particalize the text and use it for its phonemes. In these later works, cummings had already deconstructed his own text, so I wanted to present the material so you could understand the text and also understand the structure of the music.

“Also, with Paul Pines [whose poetry is the basis of The She Set], the poems are so rich with meaning that I want people to hear them very clearly, so they can confront the deeper meaning of the text.”

purer than purest pure

Composed in 1996, this is the first of Asia’s three groups of cummings settings. It falls into seven short movements for SATB chorus (SATB).

Writes the composer, “Cummings’ ideas run from the simple to the complex, from the mundane to the sublime, from the secular to the religious, from the serious to the fanciful. It is this rich gamut of thought, as well as the wondrous use of language, that has always attracted me to his work.

“The texts drawn together in this work are, for the most part, set rather clearly and simply. The music defines the spirit of the text with little attempt at word painting. However, where it seemed appropriate, I have tried to indicate musically cummings’ imaginative punctuation, spacing, and word/syllable manipulation.”

The work was commissioned by the Ithaca College Chorus, Lawrence Doebler, music director.

Why Jacob?

This work from 1979 was written in response to a commission to celebrate the opening of a new center of the performing arts at the Lakeside School, Seattle, WA (Asia’s high school alma mater; his classmates included Bill Gates and Paul Allen). “Rather than written a bright, upbeat work, I thought it appropriate to remember those who were not there to celebrate,” the composer says. “The title refers to a boyhood friend of mine who moved to Israel in his adolescence. He entered the military at age 18, as almost all Israeli youth do. He was one of the first paratroopers to die in the 1973 war. “The work is elegiac, somewhat melancholic, and certainly nostalgic. It combines both the harshest of sounds (perhaps a gunshot is even present in the piece), as well as a soft, retiring tune that keeps reappearing. An episodic work, whose edges are blurred, it ends like a music box winding down, the sounds fading into oblivion.”

The piece calls for eight-part choir (SSAATTBB), four speakers, and piano. Choral entrances are directed to imitate the attack and decay characteristics of the piano, an instrument that plays an important solo rather than merely accompanimental role. The text initially seems like vocalise, and occasionally suggests a sort of inverted Hebrew with the vowels rather than the consonants left intact; eventually, the occasional English phrase (“don’t know”) becomes evident. In the central section, the piano plays an elegantly simple, distant-sounding ballad, while the speakers and chorus produce a murmuring babble, intentionally unintelligible; the words include imagery associated with Jacob and with Seattle. After a brief piano interlude, the chorus re-enters with a vocalise chorale.

summer is over

From 1997, this was published as the second of Asia’s cummings sets (although it was actually composed third). Asia proceeded with the second and third cummings groups without a commission, because the first had renewed his enthusiasm for the poet, after decades of resistance. “Using his poetry was ubiquitous for other composers in the 1960s and 1970s,” Asia says, “because the splinters and spatters of print reflected the pointillistic musical practices of the time.” But by the mid 1990s that trend had ended. Furthermore, Asia was looking for an alternative to poet Paul Pines, whose work had been the basis of most of the composer’s song settings. Upon revisiting cummings’ work, Asia was delighted to encounter several poems that were written in traditional stanzaic form, complete with rhymes, and—most importantly—expressing what Asia calls “a deeply transcendent religious experience I had not confronted in his work before.”

Again, this collection falls into seven movements, and, as in the two other cummings collections, there are two settings of the same text, in this case “in spring.” Says the composer, “These are very slight changes on the exact same ecstatic moment, a slightly different take on the same short text. It’s like a haiku, a brief moment where truth is found. I was excited about using it structurally, as something that comes back that listeners can recognize, but without doing a literal repeat.”

The She Set

By far, Asia’s favorite source of song texts has been the American poet Paul Pines. Yet among Asia’s choral works, Pines’ name is connected only to this one work. Asia set the single poem “She” for SATB chorus in 1985, without a commission. “It was the text of Paul’s that brought forth a response from me,” he says. Asia wrote this while he was teaching at Oberlin; later in the decade, during his two-year London period, Asia interested the BBC Singers in performing the piece, which ended up being a part of a recording the group made devoted to American composers. When the present disc was being planned, the initial contents seemed a bit short, so Asia elected to expand this work with several more movements, all setting texts by Pines. Although Asia’s style has evolved over the past 25 years, the difference between “She” and his current approach is not so dramatic as the source material for his Alex Set for solo oboe, in which he used an early piece as the basis of new variations. Here, the original “She” deals in part with a woman’s separation anxiety; the new sections continue that idea, some of the texts inspired by couples from Egyptian and Greek mythology who are torn apart by death that is not necessarily everlasting. River and sea images also flow through many of these texts, which Asia sets with his customary attention to clarity of meaning.

out of more

From 1996, this is listed as the third in Asia’s cummings series, and very much follows the patterns and preoccupations of its two fellow groups. “In choosing the texts,” Asia recalls, “I looked for some kind of balance, and also a very wide panoply of emotional content, so that each set is dealing with something very intimate, something very wondrous, something perhaps ecstatic. It’s not just a collection, but a careful positioning of the movements so there is an emotional curve that is satisfying in each of those three sets.” Out of more is in some respects the most intense of the three, providing the grandest climax if they are heard in succession. Some of the pieces, notably the third and sixth, are among the most metrically restless among Asia’s mature choral works, although these fluctuations are tied more toward reflecting the natural rhythms of the texts than to producing musical complications for their own sake.

Sound Shapes

Asia initially called this work 19, because he was 19 when he wrote it and admittedly uncreative when it came to devising titles. He’d been studying at Hampshire College and was beginning to explore electroacoustic music, and listening to Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, and Pauline Oliveros performing their own compositions. He was also impressed by such choral works by Gyorgy Ligeti as his Requiem and Atmospheres. “I was intrigued by densities and incorporating that sound world into a chorus,” Asia says. He was singing in the college chorus at the time, and its director asked Asia to write a piece for the group. “I was a young composer,” Asia admits, “but the piece shows an interesting sense of shape; the sounds are quixotic and excitingly innocent in their usage. There’s even a return of material, so the form is rather clear in each movement, and even though I’m using unorthodox sounds they’re controlled in a way that provides a beginning, middle and end.” Asia was interested in using attractive sounds without regard to their meaning, so a printout of the text would consist of phonemes like ss, ff, th, mm, and vv in the first movement, and in the third, ta-ka, pa-ka, de-ke, te-ke, and so on. Even when the words “solfege et dolce ma” appear in the second movement, they are employed merely because Asia liked their sound, not because they had any particular meaning.

The chorus is split into four groups, each containing an equal number of men and women. Periodically, pitch pipes are deployed left to right to produce some non-vocal color, as are, in the final movement, finger snaps and later a foot stomp and hand clap that bring on a brief crisis.

GOTCHA! DENIED

posted by James Reel

Last week, I attended opening night of Arizona Theatre Company’s very strong production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Always on the lookout for some production error that can make me feel smug in my superiority, I was having trouble finding anything to criticize—aside from one actor’s momentary fumbling while pretending to play the bass—until I saw a sign hanging on the back wall of the set: Paramount Electrical Recordings. Aha! I thought; surely that was a mistake … wasn’t it?

By coincidence, I had just been reading about Paramount, a company completely unrelated to the film studio. It started out as a chair and cabinet manufacturer, then began building cabinets to house record players (this was very early in the 20th century), and slid into the record production business mainly to have material to give away with each purchase of a gramophone cabinet. (It was exactly like the free software you get when you buy a computer today.) The people at the Paramount corporate office didn’t really care about the record business, and did everything on the cheap; they actually used asphalt as a material in their pressings, which made for bad record surfaces to begin with, and they deteriorated very quickly, which is why most reissues of Paramount material today sound even scratchier than was the norm for the 1920s. Paramount, institutionally, also resisted switching from acoustical recording, where musicians played directly into a big horn, to newfangled electrical techniques, which would have meant investing in microphones, cables and many other pieces of equipment. The bosses at Paramount didn’t fully endorse electrical recording until 1929.

So what was a sign touting “electrical recording” doing in a play set in a Paramount recording studio in 1927? Gotcha!

Well, not quite. I had overlooked the fact, which I knew, that Paramount didn’t restrict its recording activity to its Wisconsin home office. Projects were outsoured to Chicago (where the action of Ma Rainey takes place), New York and the South, and it’s thanks to specialists in those areas that the company, almost by accident, made the earliest recordings of some very important figures in jazz and blues (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Alberta Hunter, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Fletcher Henderson, among others). And no matter how tight-fisted the corporate bosses may have been, the studios to which recording work was outsourced were often more technologically advanced.

A moment’s research confirmed that electrical equipment was, indeed, used for Paramount’s Chicago recordings by 1927, and so that sign on the ATC set was fully appropriate. You can find an interesting article on the subject here.

So, gotcha denied. But what if I had been right, and the sign had been anachronistic? Would it have mattered?

Historically, yes, but in terms of August Wilson’s drama, no. Indeed, it would have to have been a much different play if everybody, including the white studio managers, had to cluster around a single recording horn. It’s extremely important to the characters’ social relations that the white engineers be segregated from the black musicians (significantly, on ATC’s set, they’re in a booth, godlike, high above the studio floor). That would be possible only with the advent of microphones and cables and separate recording consoles. Even if Wilson had been wrong about recording history—and he was not—he would have been right dramatically.

SWARMS OF NEW REPORTERS?

posted by James Reel

Here's an interesting article about ambitious plans spearheaded by four public broadcasting entities elsewhere in the country to spend $100 million on expanding news staffs in their cities to 100 reporters and editors per market, and emphasize getting news out in a more timely, tech-savvy manner rather than suffering the usual broadcasting delays.

Without giving too much away, I can tell you that we're taking baby steps in that direction independently at Arizona Public Media, although we're not planning to spend anywhere near that kind of money, and any reporters or editors we add to the staff over the next three years will be countable on a single hand. Stick around and see how things develop.

One question that goes unasked in the link: What, exactly, counts as a "reporter"? Let's remember that somebody calling in a tip--or merely a rumor--is, at best, a "source," and by no means a reporter, just as somebody who attends a concert and summarizes how enthusiastic the audience was and how the main performers swayed as they played is hardly a critic. I hope the mega-initiative in Minnesota, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles will focus on quality, not crowdsourcing.

JOAN SUTHERLAND HAS DIED

posted by James Reel

First word from the New York Times is here.

DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT

posted by James Reel

We have an underwriting spot, for my own presenting organization, that announces "the Czech Nonet, from the Czech Republic." As opposed to, maybe, the Czech Nonet from Burkina Faso? Tucson is rampant with such redundancies, but usually only when a foreign language is involved. Spanish: Rillito River ("rillito" means "little river"). Italian: Enoteca Wine Bar (an enoteca IS a wine bar). French: that menu favorite, French Dip au jus with gravy ("au jus" means "with [its own natural] juices"; don't get me started on "with au jus," which means "with with juice"). Other examples?

FIRST LINES

posted by James Reel

The Guardian has published a short appreciation of the first lines of novels that reminds me of something I wrote on the subject long, long ago …

To Begin, Kick A Hole In A Stained Glass Window

I like a novel that, once nestled in my hands, throws open its cover and shouts, "Honey, I'm home!" I like a confident, grand entrance, a first sentence that announces itself with a flourish, takes charge, shakes up the place.

Few novels begin so boldly. Which has little to do with the quality of the tale that follows. Like the poor but honest boy who overcomes disadvantage and adversity to make good, a remarkable book may overcome a drab beginning. William Faulkner, for example, tended to open with some fairly ordinary scene-setting, often with a reference to light. Half the time Raymond Chandler would do something even duller, pointing out some ordinary building in the most ordinary way.

Nor do great first lines necessarily spawn great novels. You often get the feeling that, like the aspiring but untalented novelist in Alfred Uhry's grossly overrated play The Last Night of Ballyhoo, the author has squeezed every last drop of her creative juices into the initial sentence, and nothing but dry pulp follows.

A novel's first sentence can be the hardest part to write, and so it usually ends up being little more than a stretch at the barre before the real pirouettes and leaps begin. It rather mechanically starts to depict a setting, or introduces a character by lineage or locale. Contemporary American novelists almost never dare to begin with some sweeping observation, like Tolstoy's celebrated "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Modern Americans dare not philosophize right off the bat; in fact, it's terribly unfashionable to make a bold statement anywhere in a novel. Ours is now a literature of reticence and evasion. So an audacious opening line is arresting not just for its style, but for its novelty.

Consider this pratfall entrance from Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: "'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880)."

In a single sentence, Nabokov parodies our history of bungled translation of Russian into English (he typically fabricates the bibliographic details), and broadly hints that we've entered a parallel universe where familiar things are somehow out of kilter. It's the perfect fanfare for this particular novel.

A more serious philosophic pronouncement lurks at the beginning of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." The statement initially seems quite rational, even clinical. Its topic, though, is disturbing, and the concluding clause, bringing in the dream lives of insects and birds, introduces a crucial element of fantasy. Jackson could hardly have crafted a more appropriate opening.

Still, a great initial sentence needn't cram a novel's subject and tone into the space preceding the first period. It's enough just to give the sentence an odd twist that sets it apart from the drab journalism most of us spend too much time reading.

"Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still, / And she danced twice a day in vaudeville." So begins The Wild Party, a novel in verse by Joseph Moncure March. Not only does this sentence set up the strong beat that will carry through the flapper-era tale, but it tosses off the curious phrase "and her age stood still." Queenie is eternally youthful, certainly, but the phrase hints that, despite her looks, she's no spring chicken. It's a joke, too -- "her age" never stood still: The Jazz Age was the most jittery period of American history up to then.

A single well-turned sentence can tell us a lot about the self-knowledge of a character, especially if that character is the narrator. James Agee crafted a lovely and revealing line that eventually would open his unfinished novel A Death in the Family: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennesse, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child."

Even more self-aware, and far more pugilistic, are the words that greet us in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

A single sentence can also quickly tell us what sort of society we've dropped into. Here's the beginning of Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away: "Frances Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up." You can tell right off what segment of society, no matter how ill- equipped, holds the power, and what segment gets stuck with the dirty work, and how all the pretty pieties of religion won't save these people from the ugly habits of their fellow animals.

That wonderfully distasteful image of the corpse being dragged from the breakfast table is a fine bonus, too. Sometimes an ordinary narrative sentence can be redeemed by some strange detail being plopped into it, like the silly prize in a box of Cracker-Jack.

Lightning Song is not Lewis Nordan's best novel—that distinction falls jointly to Wolf Whistle and The Sharpshooter Blues—but it does boast Nordan's most cunning opening: "One day in the summer when he turned twelve years old and when a fragrance of sweet alfalfa hay and llama musk was drifting through the windows and into the house on a breeze from the pastures and cool shade of the little barn where pigeons cooed in the rafters, Leroy Dearman realized that the day had finally come."

"Llama musk"? That's the detail that warns us we've entered a slightly twisted world.

There's nothing slight about the twist in Harry Crews' universe, as you can tell straight off in Feast of Snakes: "She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike." That's the perfect first sentence: It forces you to read, even against your will, the second sentence.

As you might guess, I'm most attracted to opening lines that carry a whiff of the grotesque. Three of my favorites:

"I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign." — The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver.

"In the seventh year of the People's Republic of China (1956), in a remote village in Yunnan Province, Kuo Hsiao-mei gave birth to a son with extraordinarily well developed earlobes." — The Laughing Sutra by Mark Salzman.

"Three melons and a dwarf sat in the front seat of Marilee's '72 Dodge, but the cop was not amused." — Rocket City by Cathryn Alpert.

The perfect opening line needn't be a joke or have anything unusual about it at all. There's nothing more direct than the beginning of Paradise by Toni Morrison: "They shot the white girl first."

Six words, and we're already full of urgent questions. Who are "they"? Who did they shoot after the white girl? Or is it that they first shot her, then did something unspeakable to the corpse? The last word is "first," which manipulates us into demanding "What happened next?" One short, brutal sentence forces us into the novel's action.

Rarely, the first sentence can be a page-turner in a more literal sense. From drop-cap to first period, the opening sentence of Donald Antrim's The Hundred Brothers occupies two and a half pages. It names each of the hundred brothers, except the narrator, with methods that initially smack of dry Biblical genealogy, then become more anecdotal. Serpentine clauses alternate with more concise utterances, and the whole baroque structure culminates in a funny jolt of colloquialism:

"My brothers Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, Phil, Noah, William, Nick, Dennis, Christopher, Frank, Simon, Saul, Jim, Henry, Seamus, Richard, Jeremy, Walter, Jonathan, James, Arthur, Rex, Bertram, Vaughan, Daniel, Russel, and Angus; and the triplets Herbert, Patrick, and Jeffrey; identical twins Michael and Abraham, Lawrence and Peter, Winston and Charles, Scott and Samuel; and Eric, Donovan, Roger, Lester, Larry, Clinton, Drake, Gregory, Leon, Kevin, and Jack -- all born on the same day, the twenty-third of May, though at different hours in separate years; and the caustic graphomaniac, Sergio, whose scathing opinions appear with regularity in the front-of-book pages of the more conservative monthlies, not to mention on the liquid crystal screens that glow at night atop the radiant work stations of countless bleary-eyed computer bulletin-board subscribers (among whom our brother is known, affectionately, electronically, as Surge); and Albert, who is blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed Anton, schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow; and Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah, each vaguely gloomy in his own 'lost boy' way; and Eli, who spends solitary wakeful evenings in the tower, filling notebooks with drawings -- the artist's multiple renderings for a larger work? -- portraying the faces of his brothers, including Chuck, the prosecutor; Porter, the diarist; Andrew, the civil rights activist; Pierce, the designer of radically unbuildable buildings; Barry, the good doctor of medicine; Fielding, the documentary-film maker; Spencer, the spook with known ties to the State Department; Foster, the 'new millennium' psychotherapist; Aaron, the horologist; Raymond, who flies his own plane; and George, the urban planner who, if you read the papers, you'll recall, distinguished himself, not so long ago, with that innovative program for revitalizeing the decaying downtown area (as 'an animate interactive diorama illustrating contemporary cultural and economic folkways'), only to shock and amaze everyone, absolutely everyone, by vanishing with a girl named Jane and an overnight bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds; and all the young fathers: Seth, Rod, Vidal, Bennet, Dutch, Brice, Allan, Clay, Vincent, Gustavus, and Joe; and Hiram, the eldest; Zachary, the Giant; Jacob , the polymath; Virgil, the compulsive whisperer; Milton, the channeler of spirits who speak across time; and the really bad womanizers: Stephen, Denzil, Forrest, Topper, Temple, Lewis, Mongo, Spooner, and Fish; and, of course, our celebrated 'perfect' brother, Benedict, recipient of a medal of honor from the Academy of Sciences for work over twenty years in chemical transmission of 'sexual language' in eleven types of social insects -- all of us (except George, about whom there have been many rumors, rumors upon rumors: he's fled the vicinity, he's right here under our noses, he's using an alias or maybe several, he has a new face, that sort of thing) -- all ninety-eight, not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn full of the old fucker's ashes."

This circus-act writing risks alienating impatient readers, but cons the rest of us into following along. Whether the style is extravagant like Antrim's or stark like Morrison's, that's what a great opening line is supposed to do. As Tolstoy never quite observed, each bad first sentence is bad in its own way, but all great first sentences resemble each other: They demand not to be the last sentence we read in the book.