by Eleonora M. Beck as published in the IAWM Journal, Winter 1998, pp. 44-46.
CD Reviews
Elizabeth Austin's Wilderness Symphony
...and the eagle flies..., New Orchestral Music, 1997. Capstone Records CPS 8634
by Eleonora M. Beck
Elizabeth Austin's stunning Wilderness Symphony translates Carl Sandburg's poem by the same name from words into the language of music as a brilliant sound tableau-deep, penetrating, and haunting. Comprised of seven stanzas, Wilderness is one of Sandburg's so-called "musings" or introspective, dreamy poems on the subject of existence. The poem imagines a world before culture, before oppressive government: a true state of nature, one that Thomas Hobbes might have described as a war of every man against every man. Sandburg, too, envisions this mysterious time before we marked time. Animals stalk the planet: the fox, wolf, baboon, fish, eagle and mockingbird are vestiges of this primeval condition, capable of great evil and sublime goodness. Austin composes glorious music to accompany this state of nature. "We have a wilderness within us," Austin explains in the liner notes to her newly recorded symphony.
The work opens with a five-minute introduction featuring trombone flourishes and spiky percussion. Austin's writing is linear and piercing. A streamlined violin soars above the bubbling action of col legno dabs, high-hat hellos and clucking percussion. This is not the pastoral world of Appalachian Spring. Austin's is an imaginary place-in many ways a much more honest one.
In the second stanza describing the wolf, Austin demonstrates her wit and imagination by introducing the banjo in a bluegrass quotation of Foggy Mountain Breakdown. She describes it as an "intentional homage to Sandburg's love of folklore." Each succeeding stanza, recited alternately by a male and female voice, speaks to different animals that rage within each of us, as in "There is a hog in me." The "fish" section, recited by a female voice, features harp glissandi and dancing figuration. The "baboon" music is highlighted by short, punchy motives and descending sequences. Verses 6 and 7 depict the soaring eagle and the intrepid mockingbird with a recollection of Stravinsky's Petroushka for good measure.
The piece culminates in the last verse with a setting of the evocative "O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs." Here is the reunion of emotion and experience. For the only time in the piece, reciters burst into a unison melody with the words "I sing and kill and work." For this thoroughly dramatic moment, Austin keeps the voices singing together to end the poem: "I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness." The cries of the animals subside and the piece concludes with a short coda.
Austin's symphony is just that: a sonorous landscape of individualistic sounds that blend beautifully together. At first, headstrong melodies battle for recognition, but by the end they coalesce into a common existence. Austin's great gift in this piece is the meaning she composes in Sandburg's verbal blank spaces, executing lush, charismatic music during the poem's idiosyncratic ellipses and breaks between stanzas.
Orchestral Miniatures by Karen Tarlow and Helen Stanley
Orchestral Miniatures, Volume II, 1997. MMC Recordings, MMC2024
by Eleonora M. Beck
Orchestral Miniatures contains one selection each by Karen Tarlow and Helen Stanley. Tarlow, an assistant professor of theory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, titled her work Kavanah (Remembrance) along with the subtitle "Quasi-Quodlibet." It is based on a series of consonant and dissonant wisps of sound. An airy opening of twittering seconds and harp arpeggios recalls an early-morning vista. This is followed by theatrical cello lines and a quilt of tunes ranging from Yiddish melodies to the Dies Irae. (The fifth movement of the Symphonie Fantastique inevitably comes to my ears, but without the variations and pounding brass.) The piece is brief, and the imagery floats by like a coveted postcard from a distant family member. Tarlow's music is catchy and smart. It is perfectly assembled and gains momentum with each repeated listening. The end recalls the beginning, with the lively bird calls and strumming shepherdess.
Helen Stanley's Passacaglia arrives from a different part of the musical spectrum. The composer describes the work as "an orchestral meditation on the ultimate fate of multiple variant pathways in life....Veiled roadways are revealed as themes emerge in an exultant striving toward the final fortissimo illumination." The piece opens with pensive strings and builds and builds from humble ostinatos in the cellos and basses to a richly brocaded two-part fugue. The introduction of the brass rounds out the work in a brilliant major-key conclusion. Stanley, who earned degrees from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and Florida State, where her primary instructor was Ernst von Dohnanyi, is active as a conductor, choral director, pianist, orchestral string player and instructor in Florida. She has completed a symphony and two string quartets along with a variety of other chamber and choral works. Her Passacaglia proves to be an excellent introduction to her expert, contrapuntally-textured music.
Eleonora M. Beck is an assistant professor of music at Lewis and Clark College. Her book, Singing in the Garden: Music and Culture in the Tuscan Trecento, is soon to be published by Libreria Musicale Italiana.
The Women's Philharmonic, JoAnn Falletta, conductor, with the Chanticleer Vocal Ensemble and Traditional Chinese Instrumentalists. New Albion Records 090
by Elaine Barkin
Chen Yi's delight in being a composer is abundantly evident as is her ability to "speak" several languages. She is serious yet accessible, able to stir her listeners, to remind them of the sheer physical energy of orchestral music. Moreover, she devises various opportunities for players to act-out their roles as group members or as individuals. Chen Yi lives in and between two worlds and in the CD liner notes she says: "...in my music there is Chinese blood, philosophy, and customs...however since I have been studying Western music...my music becomes a bridge between peoples with different cultural backgrounds." Her grasp of conventional and extended Western orchestral timbres is secure as is her knowledge of traditional Chinese solo and ensemble instruments: the timbral (and harmonic) mixes can be heard as bridges between cultural gaps. As composers, we have always "borrowed" from one another and from other worlds; we re-interpret, we cross over and into in order to grow.
In Duo Ye No. 2 (1987), assertive crowd-grabbing groupsound is emitted at the very start-a call to attention, no mistaking the intention: this work is opening! Winds and strings play their noisy crowdsound, tremolo, semitonal glissandi, low to high, loud to louder, encompassing a wide range, lasting but 10 to 12 seconds, out of which emerges a deftly-controlled, squeaky-trilly swarm sound. Elsewhere, groupsound is evoked by variously orchestrated and rhythmicized passages which blend into and out of one another effortlessly. Chen Yi accomplishes these blends by keeping a sound alive even as she turns a corner-a maneuver absorbed by her obvious love of late Debussy, early Stravinsky, and folkish Bartok (as in Duo Ye's central, dancelike, stomping sections). Most remarkable is the way in which Chen Yi "speaks" these earlier musics, just as Duo Ye itself is "speaking" a traditional welcome song and dance of the Dong Minority of China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. We can imagine that Chen Yi is capturing the exuberance and earthiness of their welcome-practice. At the close of Duo Ye, loud, tutti, heavy-footed chomps mirror the opening tumult: the work is over.
Symphony No. 2 (1993), Chen Yi tells us, "contains the experiences of waking up to reality, introspecting and longing...[and concludes with a] mysterious dream toward the future." The work also asks artistic and political questions: How can one voice be heard from within a crowd? How can a voice be stifled? Once again, Chen Yi displays dexterity as single voices emerge out of groupsound: flute first in its lowest register with wide vibrato (Chinese bamboo-flute sound?); violoncello, heavily ornamented in a high register; clarinet vibrato starting way up there, then slithering all the way down. Each solo voice is surrounded by clamorous ensemble passages, heavy on the percussion (as in Chinese opera), all ultimately ending in silence. A romantic ethos pervades the symphony in the sense of expressing "the yearnings of the individual," as well as the extramusical. Common to the Chinese expressive ethos are attempts to bridge or obliterate gaps between the senses and between categories, as in synesthetic "hearing" the visual, "seeing" sound in terms of color, or as in deep connections between language and music.
In Ge Xu (Antiphony, 1994), Chen Yi shows us how to distinguish between background and foreground; compose a balance between pounding, aggressive, recurrent passages and those that are more flexible; and juxtapose densely chromatic harmonies with diatonic melodies. The inspiration for this work derives from her memory of antiphonal singing of the Zhuang Minority in southern China. The idea of "antiphony" seems more conceptual than actual, rather sounding to me as the simultaneity of "opposing forces" and not their alternation. As in Duo Ye, Chen Yi deftly produces complex crowd-solo textures, here with sliding string sound, variously phrased woodwinds sometimes in rotation or imitation, out of which brass melodies clearly emerge. In a far more common-sounding midsection, we are moved out of the sophisticated art world into a folk environment. Just near the end of Ge Xu, a subtle resonance of the opening bassoon solo of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps is heard, perhaps Chen Yi's sacre homage.
The last work on this CD, Chinese Myths Cantata (1996), is the most recent. Traditional Chinese string ("silk") instruments-erhu, pipa, yangqin, and guzheng-are now integrated into the fabric of the orchestral sound. The pipa for centuries has been an avant-garde sounding instrument, similar to playing techniques heard in the West as "extended-special-effects." Rapid tremolandi, fingernails on the strings, rattling noises, and striking the wooden body are all part of the pipa's sonic repertory; microtonal intervals, "bent" or TT