Spring 2002 Volume XXXI, No. 2

Meditations on Coltrane's Legacies by Salim Washington Reminiscing on Ruth by Bess Lomax Hawes New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja An Amy Beach Discography by Adrienne Fried Block ISAM Matters Reviews Celebrating Jelly Roll by Jeff Taylor Listening to Beach by Liane Curtis Transcribing the Folk by David Evans Our Singing Children by Jane Palmquist ISAM Home

New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja Sad to say, after the horrors of the Oklahoma City bombing, September 11th, and the escalation of violence in Israel, the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1974 almost seems like a quaint chapter in the history of terrorism, dating from a time when politically motivated brutality yielded a few deaths rather than dozens or thousands. For those too young to remember, Hearst was kept blindfolded and locked in a closet for nearly two months, while the SLA communicated with the outer world through a series of videotapes, much like Osama bin Laden has been doing recently. The true story of what happened to Hearst during this period remains a mystery. The SLA made various ransom demands, including a request that her family donate money to every poor person in California. As the videotapes continued, Hearst appeared on them increasingly, and her rhetoric grew ever more militant. Finally, she declared allegiance to the SLA’s ideals, saying she had been renamed “Tania.” She was photographed robbing a bank in San Francisco and then spent nearly a year as a fugitive after a gunfight between police and the SLA led to a massive fire in a house where the group had been hiding out. Anthony Davis’s opera Tania, premiered in 1992 and released this past October by Koch (3-7467-2 HI), provides a riveting reminder of those grisly events and of the techniques common to terrorists. Set to a libretto by Michael John LaChiusa, Tania “re-imagines” Hearst’s kidnapping “as a surreal trip ‘through the looking glass,’” as Davis describes it in liner notes. “The opera begins and ends in Patty’s bedroom,” he continues, “with the Symbionese Liberation Army hiding in her closet. Patty’s voyage through her closet door plunges her into a political and sexual world of dreams and nightmares filled with ambiguity and dark humor.” Narnia turns very bad. Tania is especially clever in evoking the disorientation of watching events unfold in real time while they are simultaneously replayed ad naseum in the media. It is a brilliant and intensely relevant work—imaginative yet reportorial, comic yet terrifying. Davis is one of a group of contemporary American composers who has managed to refashion opera to suit our time, newly outfitting a genre beset by images of buxom sopranos in voluminous gowns for an age of anorexia and lycra. His X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986) and Amistad (1997) have gained more critical attention than Tania. But the latter is just as dramatically effective and unstintingly political. Coincidence with events over the past year make Tania especially unsettling. Since September 11th, John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer has entered the news, mostly because of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s decision to withdraw the opera’s “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians” from a program this winter. Tania has received no similar media scrutiny, though it too provokes. “I’m the smoke in your jumbo jet,” sings Cinque, Tania’s SLA rapist. “I’m the bomb at your super bowl. I’m the outlawed. I’m the other law. I’m the anger you hunted down who now hunts you.” Disorienting, non-linear, ingeniously incorporating video (there is both a “Patty” and a “TV Patty” in the opera), the work effectively evokes the discombobulation of a trauma. As is typical of Davis’s style, Tania fuses gestures from R&B, funk, jazz, and the gamelan. “I have often been troubled by the false dichotomies of popular vs. fine art,” Davis wrote in a 1999 tribute to Duke Ellington. “In America, as well as elsewhere, these dichotomies are more a product of racism and class identity than a true reflection of the worth or value of a given work of art” (www.schirmer.com/composers/ellington_bio.html). His style is distinctively ecumenical. The “Overture,” for example, uses a sultry saxophone solo and dark timbral sheen to set a mysterious, even sinister scene, redolent of a film by David Lynch. By contrast, music for “Interlude II” alludes fleetingly to the percussive clangor of a gamelan. Davis and LaChiusa underscore the absurd ordinariness of Hearst’s saga with the recurring image of a box of crackers. At the opening, as Hearst and her “husband” watch TV in bed, they pass crackers back and forth; their exchange culminates with, “They’re fucking, fucking good.” “Pass me” is the phrase that gets transformed throughout the work, and the word “fucking” inspires some energetic music, such as on CD 2 (track 10), where there is an ebulliently pointillistic setting of the phrase “Fucking fascist bourgeois pig.” Other highlights include the rollicking groove “And the funk goes this way” (CD 1, track 8) and the gospel-tinged “In the claws of the eagle I will fight like the cobra” (CD 1, track 18), which perverts its spirit of collective jubilation by using the music to evoke the climax of a rape. * * * Experimentalism defined the career of Henry Cowell much more than politics. Yet he and his contemporaries set in place many of the activist ideals that subsequent composers, like Davis, have carried on. Whether through radical political engagement, most notably with the Composers’ Collective of the 1930s, or through a commitment to breaking down class barriers between so-called “high” and “low” forms of music, Cowell, Charles Seeger, William Grant Still, and Aaron Copland, to name just a few, sought ways to defy the hegemony of “art for art’s sake” and make their work relevant to the social and political issues of their time. Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music by Henry Cowell, 1921-1964, edited by Dick Higgins, brings together a vivid assortment of Cowell’s prose, making some long-out-of-print essays now available (McPherson & Company; $35). The volume is by no means a complete or systematic collection of Cowell’s writings. But it takes an important step toward pointing out his distinctive position among the strong tradition of composer-journalists in the twentieth century. It is divided into seven sections, “HC in Person,” “Contemporaries,” “Music of the World’s Peoples,” “HC on Works by HC, “Music and Other Arts,” “Musical Craft,” “Theory and Music History,” and it concludes with a discography. The introduction by composer, writer, and performance artist Dick Higgins (who died in 1998 at age sixty), opens with a summary of Cowell’s career. Its real strength, however, lies in the “Personal Aside” toward the end. There, Higgins tells of first encountering Cowell’s music in 1956, when he discovered a recording of the Fifth Symphony conducted by Dean Dixon. It’s a fascinating window on the mysterious process of dissemination. In the serendipitous way that life can unfold, within a couple of years Higgins was taking courses from John Cage at the New School for Social Research and studying composition with Cowell at Columbia. A preface by composer and critic Kyle Gann reveals even more about Cowell’s impact on other composers. The book should be approached for its charm and the wide-ranging possibilities for future research that leap off almost every page, rather than with high expectations for its annotations or documentation. Among the more enticing essays are “Playing Concerts in Moscow,” an account of Cowell’s trip to the USSR in 1931; selections from his important contributions to the Musical Quarterly’s “Current Chronicle”; a personal reminiscence of Ruggles, first published as part of Lou Harrison’s About Carl Ruggles of 1946; and the much-discussed but previously unpublished “The Nature of Melody” from the late 1930s. Over the summer, if you’re lucky enough to indulge in leisurely stretches of reading on a screened porch, keep Essential Cowell by your side. * * * While you’re at it, pick up Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, edited by Robert G. O’Meally (The Modern Library, 2001; $19.95). Over the last year, it’s provided me with some exceptionally pleasurable reading. Ellison devotees already know his wise and musically informed musings about American culture in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), which are reprinted here. Other gems are added in, like Ellison’s 1955 essay for High Fidelity about the mid-twentieth-century experience of negotiating a life surrounded by sound, a life in which his apartment became “an audio booby trap.” There are interviews with Ellison about music—one by Ron Welburn, another by a reporter from WKY-TV in Oklahoma City, and yet another with O’Meally (all from 1976)—as well as letters exchanged with the writer Albert Murray (mostly republished from Trading Twelves of 2000) and musical excerpts from Juneteenth and Invisible Man. O’Meally’s introduction is fulfilling as well, with downright musicality to the rhythm of its language. Like his near-contemporary Virgil Thomson, Ellison could barely open his mouth or pick up a pen without being thoroughly quotable. So I can’t resist ending this column with an excerpt from Ellison, culled from the conclusion of his article for High Fidelity. By acknowledging the wide-ranging diversity so fundamental to American society, Ellison articulated the very credo by which artists such as Anthony Davis and Henry Cowell have shaped their work:     Living with music today we find Mozart and Ellington, Kirsten Flagstad and Chippie Hill, William L. Dawson and Carl Orff all forming part of our regular fare. For all exalt life in rhythm and melody; all add to its significance. Perhaps in the swift change of American society in which the meanings of one’s origin are so quickly lost, one of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give us an orientation in time. In doing so, it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience which nevertheless help to make us what we are. In the swift whirl of time music is a constant, reminding us of what we were and of that toward which we aspire. Art thou troubled? Music will not only calm, it will ennoble thee. (14) Truth is, we’re not only ennobled by music but by minds like Ellison’s.