SOUNDTRACK: ENSEMBLE SIGNAL PLAYS JONNY GREENWOOD-Tiny Desk Concert #850 (May 20, 2019).
The blurb for this piece is actually by Jonny Greenwood (instead of an NPR staffer), so I’ll keep the whole thing.
I’ve watched a lot of Tiny Desk concerts over the years. It’s good to see musicians in the raw, away from stage lighting and backing tracks — as if they’ve just stopped by an office to play over a lunch break, with desk-bound employees watching on. The performances should expose flaws, but instead they tend to expose musicians being casually brilliant, like the members of Ensemble Signal, who certainly play these pieces beautifully.
Unfortunately, I was nowhere near Washington, D.C. for this recording. And I still find it bizarre that you can put a musical idea on paper and have it reproduced at such a distance — and with such added life. We’re used to sounds and images being shared as exact clones of one another, but the pleasure in using ink and paper is that the music is interpreted rather than just reproduced. All those years of practice, in all those players, distilled into 15 minutes of music. It’s a big privilege — and a continuing motivation to write the best I can.
The first piece, Three Miniatures from Water, was originally a sketch for an Australian Chamber Orchestra commission in 2014. I thought it’d be easier to approach writing for full orchestra by starting with a piano miniature and scaling it up. In fact, only some of the material made it to the final commission, and I always felt the original three miniatures hung together well enough as its own piece of music.
I’m a big admirer of composer Olivier Messiaen, and one of the musical scales he favored was the octatonic mode. It’s a lot like an Indian rag in that it’s a rigid set of notes, yet isn’t necessarily in a major or minor key. There are hundreds of rags in Indian music, but I was surprised to find that Messiaen’s octatonic scale isn’t one of them. Despite this, it sits nicely over a drone — and that was the starting point for this music. That and the glorious sound of the tanpura, the drone instrument that underpins everything in classical Indian music.
The piece is called Water, after the Philip Larkin poem with the same title, and was especially inspired by the final stanza:
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
The second piece, called 88 (No. 1), is also in one of Messiaen’s modes in the first half, before becoming a celebration of the mechanical nature of the piano. The performer has to put fingerless gloves on halfway through, partly in tribute to the immortal Glenn Gould, and partly because the technique requires some painful hammering. But don’t let that fool you into thinking the music is dark or angry: It is — or is meant to be — joyful.
“Three Miniatures from Water” features lots of drones from the strings ( Lauren Radnofsky on cello and Greg Chudzik on bowed upright bass). There’s also the excellent tanpura drones from Paul Coleman and Elena Moon Park. The violin from Olivia De Prato plays a slow melody that seems to appear and disappear while the piano plays a somewhat spooky pizzicato melody.
“88 (No. 1)” is a solo piano piece by Lisa Moore (who played piano on the other piece as well). It does seem to use all 88 keys in various fashion. Indeed, she does put on fingerless gloves a little more than half way through the piece where she does play quite possibly every note (I can’t imagine what that looks like on paper). For the last 45 seconds, she seems to be banging relentlessly (but tunefully–are there chords?) all over the keys.
Neither one of these pieces seem particularly joyful to me–they both seem kind of scary, but I am fascinated at the kind of compositions the guy from Radiohead makes.
[READ: June 1, 2019] “Then Again”
This is an excerpt from The Other Half, a manuscript that Ciment is writing to rebut her own 1996 memoir, Half a Life.
In that original memoir, she wrote about meeting her husband. At the time she was seventeen and he was forty-seven (and her art teacher).
She asks what should she call him now. “My husband”? Yes, if it is the story is about the man she married and lived with for forty-five years. But what if it is about an older man preying on a teenager. Should she call him “The artist” or “the art teacher.”
She says he didn’t know what to expect when he kissed her for the first time–she could have screamed or slapped him. But she had fantasized about him for the last six months, so that was not going to happen.
She kissed him back, but did she have agency? In today’s interpretation, was she about to be raped?
Twenty five years ago she described the seduction in the memoir.
In her version, she waited for him after class, unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, crossed his room and kissed him. He kissed back and then stopped himself. He said he can’t. He liked to but he can’t. He could get arrested. If she were older…
So looking back, who kissed who first? Was her husband in the language of today a a sexual offender, abuser or power. Or in terms of the 90s when the memoir was written, maybe a cradle robber or a letch. Or in the language of the 70s when it happened: Casanova. And is she a victim or a survivor?
After the kiss, she moved to New York where she failed to become an artist and wound up making money by posing nude for “artists” (really a sex parlor called Escapades). She moved back home after four months and went to see her mentor.
She went to his studio. The door was unlocked and she walked in. He was asleep on his cot. He stirred, but she hushed him. She removed her shirt and lay beside him. It wasn’t hard to seduce him.
She says this is all true as she remembers it, but would she have done it if he hadn’t kissed her the first time? She says it seemed empowering after the experience at Escapades, but was it.
When she wrote the first memoir, was she protecting her husband or her marriage (it was their 27th anniversary when she wrote the memoir).
This is fascinating.
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