"Joyful Noise"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, April 16, 2012.
In 1911, Hervey White, the founder
of the Maverick Arts Colony, in
Woodstock, New York, published an
epic poem entitled “The Adventures of
Young Maverick,” in which he extolled
a wild horse, “free from the ownership
of any master.” White’s utopian activities probably hastened the spread of the word “maverick”—associated at
first with unbranded cattle—as a metaphor for independent-mindedness in
American culture and politics. In recent decades, the term has spiralled inexorably toward meaninglessness. If
Madonna, Sarah Palin, the Dallas basketball team, and the Tom Cruise character in “Top Gun” are mavericks,
then everyone is, and no one.
In American musical history, though,
the word retains a rough descriptive
value, indicating a lineage of nonconformist composers that goes back a
century to Charles Ives, the insurance
executive who revelled in sonic chaos
on the weekends. Others in this succession are Carl Ruggles, the irascible
New Englander with a flair for discord;
Edgard Varèse, the French expatriate
who set the pace for New York’s early
modernist scene; Henry Cowell, the
California pioneer of cluster chords
and open forms; Harry Partch, the
sometime hobo who devised instruments pegged to a forty-three-note
scale; Lou Harrison, the celebrant of
the Indonesian gamelan; Conlon Nancarrow, the master manipulator of the
player piano; and, of course, John Cage,
the genial emperor of the avant-garde.
Partch spoke of maverick artists in
his formidable 1949 text “Genesis of
a Music.” In the nineteen-seventies,
Philip Glass saluted the “maverick tradition,” linking outsider music of the early twentieth century to the rebellious onset of minimalism. Michael
Tilson Thomas, the longtime music
director of the San Francisco Symphony, adopted the word for a pair of
festivals that he mounted in 1996 and
2000; the first edition is happily burned
in my memory as a boisterous uprising
against a staid orchestral culture. Last
month, Tilson Thomas revived the
theme, presenting four “American
Mavericks” concerts at home, in San
Francisco; at the University Music Society, in Ann Arbor; and, finally, at
Carnegie Hall, whose programmers
shook off the caution of recent seasons
and arranged auxiliary events at spaces
around the city.
After eight concerts in eight days, I
found the “maverick” label hazier than
ever, particularly when it came time to
induct living composers into the club.
As John Pickford Richards, the violist
of the JACk Quartet, commented in a
program note accompanying the
group’s contribution to the festival—a
blistering traversal of Ives’s Second
Quartet, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s “String Quartet 1931,” and Steven
Mackey’s “Physical Property”—anyone
foolish enough to pursue a living as a
composer is going against the grain.
Unless you happen to be named Philip
Glass, the corporate colossus of popular culture has no use for you. Yet, a
few lulls aside, the musical offerings
were so enthralling that I soon stopped
worrying about the “m” word. In the
end, it sticks. Not by accident, the première of Cage’s “4'33" ”—the famous
1952 piece in which the performer
makes no sound—took place at the
Maverick Concert Hall, in Woodstock, with a wooden statue of Hervey
White’s wild horse listening in.
Cage, whose hundredth anniversary arrives in September, was at the heart of “American Mavericks.” The
first San Francisco Symphony concert
at Carnegie opened with his “Song
Books,” a 1970 work that calls for a
comprehensive tumult of sounds and
activities. A starry trio of vocal soloists
was on hand to realize Cage’s brain-teasing instructions: Joan La Barbara, a
veteran Cage interpreter; Meredith
Monk, one of the few living musicians
fully deserving of the “maverick” name;
and Jessye Norman, in all her diva
splendor. The Carnegie main stage was
transformed into a kind of homemade
habitat in which these singers, Tilson
Thomas, and musicians from the San
Francisco Symphony moved about and
made noise, with video projections
magnifying their gestures. The highlight came when Norman, executing
Solo 15 of “Song Books,” sat at a typewriter and repeatedly banged out a
phrase from the writings of Erik Satie
(“The artist has no right to waste the
audience’s time,” in French), while Tilson Thomas fed a cucumber, celery,
carrots, an apple, and a banana into a
Cuisinart and made himself a smoothie.
The proceedings unfolded with
graceful absurdity, although you never
quite forgot that a group of celebrity
artists was paying homage to Cage.
The previous night’s “Mavericks” concert—a Cage tribute by the ensemble So Percussion—had a more riotous immediacy. Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt, of the electronic duo
Matmos, joined the members of So for
a collage of canonical Cage pieces and
new works created for the group by
Cenk Ergün, Dan Deacon, and the
performers themselves. The event
lasted ninety-one minutes—4'33"
times twenty—with a chronometer
onstage supplying a countdown; the
clock came in handy for Deacon’s
“Take a Deep Breath,” which invited
the audience to hoot, holler, stamp,
sing, and set off smartphone alarms at
intervals designated in a handout.
Meanwhile, Schmidt, dressed in a
classic Cagean outfit of a gray suit and
a slender tie, recited the monologue
“45' for a Speaker,” and Daniel did
thirty pushups, in keeping with Cage’s
instruction to “perform a disciplined
action.” (He later stripped to his underwear.) The evening was an exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy,
rigor and bedlam—Cage punkishly reinvented for a new generation, without
nostalgia for the old downtown scene.
Tilson Thomas and the San Franciscans were at their best in honoring
the monuments of the maverick tradition. Varèse’s 1921 juggernaut “Amériques,” which concluded the first concert, received an opulent, flawlessly
balanced performance, avoiding the
sense of overkill that can ensue in less
assured hands. The second concert
brought together Ruggles’s “Sun-Treader,” Morton Feldman’s “Piano
and Orchestra,” and Henry Brant’s
crisp orchestration of the Ives “Concord” Sonata, here retitled “A Concord
Symphony.” The genius of this program was that it slyly subverted the
business-as-usual subscription concert,
which all too often supplies an orchestral opener, a concerto, and a symphony. Tilson Thomas served up an
overture of apocalyptic force, a concerto in which the piano hovers on the
edge of silence (Emanuel Ax was the
hypersensitive soloist), and a symphony
incorporating both monolithic dissonance and marching-band vulgarity.
Other orchestras hardly touch this
music, but in San Francisco it has become standard fare, and the authority
of the playing was staggering. “Sun-Treader,” which Ruggles completed in
1931, is one of the most potent works
ever conceived in an atonal idiom, and under Tilson Thomas it took on Beethovenian inevitability, not to mention
Mahlerian heat in the section marked
“Serene, but with great expression.”
The fact that this was only its third
New York rendition in more than
twenty years should be a source of
local embarrassment. (The good news
for Ruggles fans is that the San
Francisco new-music organization
Other Minds will soon reissue Tilson
Thomas’s recorded survey of the composer’s output, which appeared on LP
in 1980 but, inexplicably, never made
it to CD.)
A sixty-thousand-dollar grant from
the National Endowment for the Arts
helped the San Francisco Symphony,
and its partners, commission four new
pieces for “American Mavericks.” The
loveliest of these was Monk’s “Realm
Variations,” for six singers and seven
instrumentalists, with a piccolo player
taking the lead role. While the likes of
Ruggles and Varèse rant majestically
against the world, Monk, like Feldman
before her, seeks out alternative spaces
of repose; in “Realm Variations,” the
dynamic level never rises above forte,
and layerings of folkish melody are interspersed with deep-breathing silences. One episode suggested a scene
on a transcendental pond, with the
upper voices murmuring like insects,
the piccolo chirping insistently, and a
contrabass clarinet joining Sidney
Chen, the bass member of the Monk
vocal ensemble, to sound like a maverick frog. Monk, with Tilson Thomas’s
encouragement, has turned toward
concert forms in recent years, and
“Realm Variations” is her most cogent,
confident effort to date.
John Adams’s “Absolute Jest,” the
other keeper among the commissions,
is a manic takeoff on the scherzo movements of the late Beethoven quartets,
with hints of the “Grosse Fuge” and the
Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony
thrown in. Although, at twenty-five
minutes, it may have gone on a bit long,
it offers the engaging spectacle of one
major composer thrashing around in
the sound world of another. Morton
Subotnick’s “Jacob’s Room: Monodrama” and Mason Bates’s “Mass
Transmission” took on ambitious topics—the agony of world conflict, the ecstasy of global communication—but in both cases the musical invention lagged
behind the concept. Bates’s note-spinning sounded especially feeble in the company of the adamantine elders. A friend commented
that if he were a composer this festival
would make him want to tear up everything on his desk and start over.
Some younger composers, fortunately, need no spur to move forward. In a downtown extension of
“American Mavericks,” the Brooklyn-based new-music impresario Nick
Hallett, who co-hosts an invaluable series called “Darmstadt: Classics of the
Avant-Garde” at ISSUE Project Room,
presented a pair of concerts at the
kitchen. These events, too, were an
up-and-down affair, at times numbingly tedious in time-honored downtown fashion. An attempt at resurrecting Arthur Russell’s “Instrumentals,” a
semi-legendary 1975 spectacle that
wedded minimalist repetition to easy-listening pop, propelled about half the
audience toward the exits, and left me
writhing in my seat. (Ear-stabbing
amplification didn’t help.) A group of
pieces for jazz septet, by the guitarist
and composer Mary Halvorson, explored the border zones between
genres with a great deal more zest.
William Basinski’s 2008 electronic
work “Vivian & Ondine” dwelled for
forty-five minutes on a four-note lamenting figure; my mind wandered,
though it did not yearn to flee the
premises.
The most arresting new piece of the
kitchen sub-series, and perhaps of the
entire festival, was “Dual Synthesis,”
by the twenty-nine-year-old New
York composer Tristan Perich. An
old-school eccentric who drew attention a few years ago for carrying around
a bulky push-button telephone outfitted with cellular capability, Perich
has specialized in pieces for one-bit
electronics—raw, buzzing sonorities
harking back to the early days of synthesized sound. “Dual Synthesis”
mixes those saw-toothed textures with
hallucinogenic arpeggios on a harpsichord, here played with extreme virtuosity by Daniel Walden. The antique
machines of different ages came together in a hurtling form, savage and
beautiful and strange.