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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside This Issue: Documenting
Calypso by Stephen Stuemple Johanna Beyer by Melissa J. de Graaf Exploring Roots Music: Review by
Charles K. Wolfe Cage and Carter DVDs: Review by Anton Vishio |
DVDs a la Mode A classical music video is a predictable affair. One
can expect to see wide shots of the performers, with the occasional cuts to
the audience and the hall itself to establish the atmosphere. Someone in the
control room shows off knowledge of the score as the camera zooms in on a
player just about to begin a solo. This annoying practice virtually commands
the viewer, “This is what you should be listening to now.” A different and more rewarding model for how such
videos might work is presented in two recent DVDs on Mode featuring films by
the Dutch director Frank Scheffer. Focusing on the
music of Elliott Carter and John Cage, Scheffer’s
works suggest that such films might convey the compositional principles
behind the musical works they document. Of course his composer subjects could
not be more dissimilar in those principles, and a very different kind of film
emerges for each. The film Quintet for Piano and Strings
appears on the DVD Elliott Carter: Quintets and Voices (Mode
128, 2003). It begins in near
obscurity behind pianist Ursula Oppens, and the
camera seems intent on revealing as little as possible about the identity of
the performers. As the Quintet unfolds, the members of the Arditti Quartet gradually come into view, but rarely is
more than one player at a time the focus of a shot. The players are attempting
to work together, as furtive glances from one to another show, but the gulf
between them is wide. A striking sequence early on confirms this. We see
Irving Arditti, the first violinst,
in a shot from behind cellist Rohan de Saram, looking up toward him with a serious expression.
Immediately following we see de Saram from behind Arditti, and we feel almost as if they looked at each
other from the opposite sides of a canyon. We also begin to get the sense
that the piano is trying to insert itself into the gap, with Oppens visually in the center, striving to communicate
with both sides—or perhaps as the driving force in the wedge between
them. Many of the shots that follow are closeups of the players, some decidedly uncomfortable. It
is only within the last two minutes of the film that we begin to see
something of the big picture, as the camera pans from one side of the quartet
to the other. However, we never see all five players together, but an
alternation between the viola and cello on one side, and the violins on the
other. Grouped with the latter is the piano, which seems to succeed at last
in fracturing the quartet. Here the camera feels most expressive, trying to
bring the five performers together at the finale. But in a brilliant stroke Scheffer allows the camera to fail and a final unity is
never achieved. Readers who have spent time with Carter’s
music will recognize several of its more prominent themes in the structure of
the film. Perhaps most notable is how Scheffer
captures the intensity of individuality that is at the heart of
Carter’s approach to writing for instruments. The film explores the interaction of those
individuals in a variety of ways, some more cooperative, some more
antagonistic. In fact, while the main tension is between the piano and the
string quartet, the latter is not simply singing with one voice, either in
the music or in the film. Thus, in idiomatically cinematic ways, Scheffer has produced a visual analogue of Carter’s
compositional practice. This process is more overt in Scheffer
and Andrew Culver’s collaboration titled From Zero: Four Films on
John Cage (Mode 130, 2004).
Of special interest here is a performance of Cage’s work, Fourteen,
by the Ives Ensemble. Like all of Cage’s late number pieces, the
instrumentalists are assigned parts which contain mostly single notes and
chance-distributed time brackets indicating the period of time (as measured
by a stopwatch) within which the notes are to be played. Perhaps the most
distinctive feature of Fourteen is the presence of a bowed piano which
contributes sounds of extended duration. The piano, alone, plays
continuously, as Cage indicates, “an unaccompanied solo…in an
anarchic society of sounds.” In order to film the work, Scheffer
and Culver decided on some anarchic principles of their own, providing
Cage-like scores for a team of “undirected camera
performers,” for lighting, and eventually for editing. The result is a
mesmerizing essay in Cagean “anarchic
harmony” in multiple dimensions that enhance one another, facilitated
by the shimmering sonorities of complex harmonics that the composer draws
from the ensemble. In the film’s
most arresting sequence a camera slowly pans across a trumpet and its player,
mostly out of focus (characteristically, the trumpet is not being sounded at
this point). The trumpet seems like three points of light, then several, and
only gradually does the actual form emerge. Meanwhile a complex sound grows
out of rich but uncertain harmonics that glisten much
as the trumpet does as it moves into and out of focus. As for the solo piano,
no one feature of the lighting or editing seems to correspond to
it—until one remembers that the only constant through the film is the
viewer, alone in an anarchic society of images. The Carter and Cage DVDs contain additional
materials of considerable interest. From Zero includes three other
films by Scheffer and Culver, all of which
incorporate chance operations to some extent. In 19 Questions, Cage
speaks on randomly selected topics for periods of time also determined by
chance. In Paying Attention, Culver and Scheffer
work like Cage and Merce Cunningham, with Culver
manipulating the audio portions of a Cage interview while Scheffer
plays with the visual sequences, without either knowing what the other is
doing. The last film, Overpopulation and Art, overlays the composition
Ryoanji, interpreted both in sound and film,
with Cage’s reading of a mesostic recorded in
the last year of his life. The result is a moving memorial. Valuable interviews with Culver and Scheffer place the films in context. The Carter DVD contains an interview with Arditti, Oppens, Joshua Cody
and the composer. But the most valuable parts of the DVD are the performances
in very radiant sound. The Quintet receives a second, tighter, reading, but
there is also the more boisterous Quintet for Piano and Winds and the
beautifully paced Syringa and Tempo e
Tempi performed by the Ensemble Sospeso. Scheffer’s
excellent new Carter documentary, A Labyrinth of Time, will be
released soon by Mode. Recently
premiered at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, it is
not to be missed. —Brooklyn, NY |