The Pianist's Space

by Marilyn Nonken

Since my late teens, when I discovered the music of Schoenberg and the postwar moderns, I’ve been fascinated by the twentieth-century repertoire. In college, I was fortunate to study with a pioneer of new music piano performance, David Burge, for whom many landmark works were written, including George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I. As my tastes have developed over the past decade, my repertoire now includes a variety of composers, ranging from Alvin Lucier, Mario Davidovsky, Milton Babbitt, Salvatore Martirano, and Charles Wuorinen to younger voices such as Lee Hyla, Jason Eckardt, Jeff Nichols, and David Rakowski. I generally find myself drawn to atonal works that are rhythmically adventurous, conceptually unusual, and physically demanding, and to composers with distinct voices and strong musical personalities.

As a performer, I mediate the delicate space between the work as written and the music as heard. Composition, writes the composer Chris Dench, is “the making manifest of a particular vision, an envisaged musical domain that is…unendurably absent from the expanding musical universe.”¹ As a player of new music, I have the chance to render the “unendurably absent” a vital and sonorous part of reality.

Performers of contemporary music have extraordinary responsibilities. In contrast to works of the common practice era, new works are rarely performed. The pieces I bring to the concert hall are usually unavailable on recording and won’t be performed again anytime soon, or by anyone else. Often, the audience’s impression of a composer’s music will depend wholly on my interpretation. If I were to play a Beethoven sonata or Chopin ballade poorly, for example, it is unlikely that Beethoven’s or Chopin’s reputations would suffer as a result. But when I play a new work, whatever I do may be attributed to the composer, for better or worse. As the boundaries between the work and its interpretation become blurred, I become less and less like an actor—one who reads a script presumably written by another—and more like a simultaneous translator. In the act of performance, I essentially assume the voice of the composer and must speak with extreme care.

Faithfulness to the score is paramount. However, just as playing only the notes on the page won’t do justice to Bach or Mozart, it isn’t sufficient for a new work. Because the listener’s memory will iron out details over time, ultimately rendering the most vivid musical impressions in muted shades, I seek to play not only accurately but memorably. Nothing is as dissatisfying as the stereotypical “new music” piano sound—dry, clinical, and relentlessly percussive—or as immediately forgettable. But brashness, reticence, passion, and sentimentality are the kinds of characteristics we remember, long after notes and rhythms have faded. Sudden shifts of color and dynamic and the kinds of exuberant and shocking gestural juxtapositions only found in the contemporary repertoire need to be articulated with clarity and conviction. Although listeners may not be able to determine the correspondence between my performance of an unfamiliar work and what’s on the page, they can certainly distinguish the eloquent from th

e inarticulate. In October 1999, I premiered a work written for me, Jeff Nichols’s Chelsea Square (1999). In this harmonically luscious but formally unpredictable composition, extended passages of stormy polyphony subside suddenly into areas of stillness and calmness; yet in the pauses between violent gales of activity, even the most beautiful, lyrical writing is imbued with tension. It is as if the piece is powered by an inner windstorm. The composer suggested that I project a sound “that you could take a bath in,” and I chose to play his piece with a Brahmsian tone, using a heavier, deliberate touch softened by the pedal. This warm sound would invite listeners to bathe in the sheer lushness of the material, set them at ease, and free them to ponder the unusual formal developments. On the same program, I premiered another work written for me, Milton Babbitt’s Allegro Penseroso (1999). Finding this new piece joyous and lively, as colorful as a Bosch triptych, I sought to play it with the bright and sparkling tone one might associate with Poulenc or Milhaud. This brought out the work’s natural vivaciousness and the playful quality that lies just beneath its rhythmic and contrapuntal intricacies: the giddiness of the high-register hocketing that begins and ends the piece and the fragments of jazz-influenced tunes curiously poking out of the texture. There’s something about the work’s dryness, its taut brilliance—perhaps its lack of nineteenth-century sentimentality—that seems very French to me. I don’t expect that many of my listeners will mistake Nichols for Brahms, nor Babbitt for Poulenc, or even make these same whimsical associations. But in the absence of established contemporary performance practice, each new work deserves an evocative sound world in which to live.

As an avid listener, I tend to be dissatisfied with most “mixed programming”–the combining of works from earlier centuries with those of the postwar period. To me, new music demands creative listening strategies. The music of Carter and Crumb asks us to listen with different ears than the ones we use for the standard repertoire. Certainly, some factors are an integral part of almost all musical experiences, tonal or atonal: the tension and release of harmony, the play of rhythm and counterpoint, the drama of form and development, and the arousal of the emotions. Yet in listening to common-practice music, we become accustomed to its signature regularities of rhythm and meter, harmony, form, and style. When faced with a work that does not exhibit these regularities, we cannot help but note their absence. Too often, we begin by characterizing unfamiliar works by what they are not, rather than judging them on their own merits.

A few years ago, I performed a recital of recent works, each of which explored a different kind of aesthetic and perceptual complexity. Inspired in part by the New Complexity movement, Jason Eckardt’s Echoes’ White Veil (1996), which represented the United States at last year’s World Music Days, has been described as “daring and exuberant...somewhere between Szymanowski and Luciano Berio.”² In contrast, Alvin Lucier’s Music for Piano With Pure Wave, Slow-Sweep Oscillators (1991) required that I play only occasional pitches on the keyboard; these sounds triggered intricate and elegant webs of acoustic phenomena, resulting from the interaction of the piano’s timbre and an electronic tape part. Also on the program was Salvatore Martirano’s witty hybrid of late 1960s serialism and jazz, Cocktail Music (1962), whose complexities are rooted in the collision and fusion of styles and materials. Each of these pieces contains a world in itself, a unique vision of what music can be.

It is often argued that audiences won’t come to a program of all twentieth-century music, when half of the works are by emerging composers whose names are unfamiliar. Yet this argument underestimates today’s listeners. In my experience performing in New York City and in smaller venues around the country, I’ve found listeners to be wonderfully open-minded. Audiences today are exposed to more kinds of music than ever before: classical, jazz, world music, and all veins of rock and popular music. Research in the field of music perception and cognition affirms that the more diverse our listening experiences, the greater the wealth of associations we bring to all our listening experiences and the more meaningful they become. I’m not surprised when some of the most enthusiastic listeners who approach me after concerts are not the standard “new music enthusiasts,” but listeners whose experiences with John Coltrane, Stephen Sondheim, and the throat singers of Tuva have prepared them for their encounters with late–twentieth-century composers. These are the listeners who make me optimistic about the future of new music.

The late–twentieth-century repertoire is a rare bird, a body of works for which the media hasn’t provided sound bites and video clips. Some lament the lack of attention our art form has received. Yet its seeming anonymity is also a gift: new music offers today’s audiences a uniquely uncorrupted listening experience. With our own ears and imaginations, we explore uncharted musical domains and become an active part of the expanding musical universe.

For more information on Nonken, visit www.ensemble21.com.

Notes

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¹ Chris Dench, “Sulle Scale della Fenice: Postscript,” Perspectives of New Music 29/2 (1991), 101.

²Paul Griffiths, “Galaxies Apart in Style Yet Following a Certain Path,” New York Times (15 May 1998), E8.

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