“Do it Yourself” Music
Parts of my “Music of the 70s” focus… except for the Beck.
While I expect cello playing is going to have to go to the back seat again, as I prepare for the Fall semester and put the first draft of the Mayuzumi paper together, I have become particularly interested in three “do it yourself” pieces: compositions which, in one way or another, require the performer to decode, or perhaps, make an arrangement of the score. I’ve mentioned Beck’s Song Reader (2012) in connection with the Creative Cello Workshop, and Kagel’s Siegfriedp’ (1971) certainly, but the Maki Ishii’s La-Sen II (1970) is a new piece for me (just came in the mail).
Slapping Beck around
I’ve actually owned Song Reader for several years. I was delighted by the idea that Beck had released an album as single sheets rather than as a recording, challenging his fans, in effect, to play the songs for him. The single sheets reminded me of the sheet music in the piano bench at my Grandparents’ farm growing up, and even though I knew very little of Beck;’s music, I bought the set anyway. I snarled through the songs at the piano for several weeks before finally setting it aside - I wanted to make solo cello “realizations,” but felt I didn’t really have the background to pull it off. When I started last month’s workshop with Eugene Friesen, it seemed like a golden opportunity. I pulled out my favorites, “Eyes that Say ‘I Love You’” and “Old Shanghai,” almost immediately. While I did actually work on the tunes that Mr. Friesen assigned, I always ended my practice each night with one or the other of them… sometimes both. I’m still not sure what a final performance of these songs might look like, but the workshop has given me a better sense of where I’m going. To that end, I’ve also started working on “Slap,” an etude of Mr. Friesen’s that he has found helps cellists unlock the potential of pizz. and left hand effects—maybe this will help me figure out a way to create true solo realizations… or at least to create interesting backing tracks.
First steps.
Mauricio Kagel’s (1931-2008) Siegfriedp’ is another piece that I’ve owned for a long time. He restricts himself to a startlingly narrow palette: the same five pitches, a soggetto cavato from Siegfried Palm’s name (siEGFrieD pAlm) are repeated, in essentially the same rhythm, over and over, for about six and a half minutes. For variety, Kagel distributed the notes capriciously over the whole range of the cello, in the most awkward, disjunct configurations imaginable. A third staff above the cello part includes sharp intakes and releases of breath, yelps, moans, and other vocalizations of frustration. In a 2003 interview with Kagel, Anthony Coleman confirmed (or at least, he proposed, and Kagel did not deny…) that the work is a sort of theater piece.
“Siegfriedp’ [for solo cello, from Program, a series of short pieces from 1971–72] was a very influential piece for me because of the way you created a kind of musical theater that was based not on traditional theater but on the theater of performance—the natural things that happen to an instrumentalist. He plays the same melody over and over but as he plays it, in ways that become more and more impossible, you notice his stress and his strain and it’s natural. He doesn’t have to act because trying to get those harmonics is hard enough. You create something very similar to Beckett for me in that way: trying to act while you’re buried in the ground. ”
Kagel’s notes to the performer are almost comically flippant. Cellists are left to figure out how to achieve the notes in the score on their own, but he helpfully provided a table of artificial harmonics, and suggested that “notes played successively on one string or two adjacent strings should basically be slurred.” For convenience, a blank stave was printed below the score as a sort of workspace.
I think the work with Mr. Friesen has made serious work on this piece possible for me. While before the idea of re-writing and learning all ten pages caused my brain to stall like an old car, I have found myself more willing to proceed, more or less a page at a time; I start by finding what Mr. Friesen would call a “convenient” solution for each cell, and then slowly join them together. By working in lines and pages, I essentially “Simplify the Solo Section,” and as the notes start to fall under my fingers more naturally, I pay attention to what my bow wants to do in terms of the articulation. Eventually, I’ll work in the dynamic and timbral shading Kagel calls for, and then the “vocal” parts.
It is funny to work on a piece where I’m supposed to make noise while I play… I used to get chewed out for that.
Let’s see, a circle with an X but without a dark bar…
Maki Ishii (1936-2003) is a particularly interesting composer in my sphere since, like Toshiro Mayuzumi, he studied with Ikenouchi and Ifukube, and like Isang Yun, he went to Berlin to study with Blacher and Rufer. This piece consists of seven single sheets, each with a number of short gestures related by timbre (the page marked “P,” for example includes pizzicato effects, “H” features harmonics, etc.). Sheets 1 and 7 are intended to be played contiguously, and accordingly have about half as many musical gestures. The performer plays through the sheets three times, such that 1 and 7 are always on the ends, 4 is in the middle, and the other four are arranged in positions 2, 3, 5, and 6 a piacere. The gestures may be played in any order, and with each cycle, more of the gestures are omitted, and greater freedom is allowed with the timbre and dynamics. In the third cycle, the piece may end at any point after sheet 4. It seemed easiest, again, to “simplify the solo section” by learning each page individually, and then fussing about the disposition of the gestures and pages. Ishii specifically asks that the work be performed without interruption, so I expect to “curate” the order at some point, scanning the sheet, and re-arranging the gestures on the final pages. While the process is somewhat simpler than re-working the Kagel, Ishii uses a formidable array of idiosyncratic symbols that take some deliberate thinking.
I suppose programs like this are ideal for the COVID-19 performance environment: no one would come to this recital anyway, so it is uniquely suited for the virtual environment. Maybe I should even create an accompanying narrative, slideshow of images—create a sort of “four dimensional” performance that isn’t tied to place or time… something to think about, anyway.