Category: Sounds Canadian

Violet Archer Faraway, So Close

Last time I listened to a disc of concertos by R. Murray Schafer, but only after I had scoured the listening library database for every last recording by said Canadian composer.R-12215282-1530717631-4779.jpeg.jpg This led me to a 5-disc compilation, Ovation: Volume 2, which does indeed feature a disc of R. Murray Schafer’s music that includes his first concerto, written in 1954 for harpsichord and eight wind instruments. But that’s for some other time. This time I couldn’t resist the first disc in the set, featuring an assortment of pieces by another Canadian, Violet Archer (1913-2000), covering an almost 40-year span, from the Sonata for Flute, Clarinet and Piano of 1944 to the finale from the Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello of 1981.

Nexus entry.

Can I share something about process? I like my first listen to happen before I read the notes. So I listened, not knowing anything at all about Violet Archer or her music. When I got to the Divertimento for Saxophone Quartet (1979), I was struck by what I heard as a debt to Bartók, particularly in the third movement (marked “Festive”). More specifically, I heard one of my favorite movements of the Bartók quartets, the middle movement of the Second Quartet, a barn burner if ever there was one. Then once more, in the final work on the disc, the Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello, I heard echoes of Bartók’s quartets, but. . .what can you do? What young composer, having heard Bartók’s quartets, would not want to seize hold of that inimitable kinesis, that frolic and force and ferocious fire? So I thought Violet Archer perhaps stumbled inadvertently into the shadow of the Hungarian master. Then I read the liner notes. Turns out that Violet Archer, ahem, studied with Bartók in New York in 1942. So there’s that. This was no accidental traipse through a shadow, but the transmission of something tangible from teacher to student. Archer earned her Bartók merit badge.

Similarly, when I heard Archer’s Landscapes (1951), a trio of settings of short texts by T. S. Eliot for choir, I heard something like Vaughan Williams at a distance, or at least that era of British composers, occasionally even in the direction of ¡¡¡BrItTeN!!!. And then the notes. Another of her teachers was Douglas Clarke, himself a Brit, who studied with Vaughan Williams and Charles Wood. Archer was, like Clarke, an organist, and it’s tempting to imagine that the transmission of that early twentieth-century British choral idiom was carried on a current of liturgical music that they both played. Alas, there’s really none of that choral liturgical music on this album, although there is an art-song-like setting of Psalm 23.

And now something I missed. Upon listening to the Sonata for Flute, Clarinet, & Piano (1944), the earliest work on the album, I heard in its sardonic style, its playful half-poisoning of familiar dance idioms, the stamp of Shostakovich. But the notes revealed that her longest period of composition studies was under Paul Hindemith, from 1947-9. And once I read that, even though her study with Hindemith came after the composition of the Sonata, I could now hear an early affinity with Herr neue Sachlichkeit. My favorite thing about Archer’s Sonata? Repeated, and I would say unmistakable, wisps of Sobre las olas (Over the Waves, 1888), the waltz by Mexican composer Juventino Rosas (1868-94) that would eventually be adapted into “The Loveliest Night of the Year” for the 1951 film The Great Caruso, starring Mario Lanza. 51rBAbROLiL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgNot that Archer could have known that in 1944, which begs the question: What’s it doing in there, besides parading around its insouciant self? A little searching revealed that Sobre las olas supposedly had a long association with (fun)fairs in the United States, in part because it was a tune available on Wurlitzer fairground organs. If that’s where Archer got the idea to use the tune – she was an organist, after all? – then its use seems of a piece with the “classic” neoclassical aesthetic set forth by Cocteau in Le coq et l’arlequin, bringing fairs and circuses and machines into the concert hall.

Speaking of concert halls, here’s something else from the liner notes that piqued my interest: Archer’s “Cradle Song” (1949), second in a set of four songs on this album, had its première in 1952 at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). Archer_1950.jpgElsewhere in the notes the writer says that Archer was composer in residence at “Texas State University” before moving on to the University of Oklahoma; I can only imagine that NTSU/UNT is what was meant, and indeed there’s a brief bio of Archer on UNT’s website on a page listing former composition faculty. All that to say that Archer, this composer whose music I found when searching for R. Murray Schafer recordings, was professor at my alma mater, taught in the program where I would receive composition degrees some four decades later. And who was one of her students but Larry Austin, who by the time I was working on my degree had become a composition professor there himself. Small world, eh?

When from time to time I’ve thought of Larry Austin (1930-2018), one of the things that most frequently pops into my head is the concert where I first heard his Canadian Coastlines (1981). 81s0vx61gUL._SS500_.jpg(Picture eight instrumentalists with headphones, each hearing a different clicktrack, with everything routed through a massive central mixing board, wires strewn all over stage.) The piece itself was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and in writing it Austin derived musical phenomena from maps of, yes, sections of the Canadian coastline. As a student I heard an anecdote about the piece where John Cage, Austin’s longtime friend, “seemed enthralled by the piece, and after the performance very enthusiastically said, ‘Larry, it was beautiful; I didn’t understand it.’” [1] I’ve often told that anecdote as a way of illustrating Cage’s aesthetic preference for unknowability, but just this week, through my encounter with the music of Violet Archer, Austin’s teacher, the piece has come to mean something more to me.

For Canada is a presence in several pieces on the Archer album. That presence is perhaps at its most unmistakable in the song cycle Prairie Profiles (1980), for the unusual combination of baritone, horn, and piano. The work was commissioned, like Austin’s Canadian Coastlines, by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was written “in honour of Alberta’s 75th birthday.” Of all the pieces on this album, Prairie Profiles includes the most extreme effects: explosive, terrifying, raw, stark – all qualities that seem worlds away from, for example, the Sonata for Flute, Clarinet, and Piano. Take the first of the songs, “Buffalo Jump,” where a moto perpetuo line in the piano’s lowest range suggests the stampeding of untold numbers of bison as they plunge off a cliff, after which there is simply silence. The combination of mad violence and bleak emptiness, an uncompromising stare into the elemental, reminds me again of The Monk by the Sea, which I mentioned in my entry on Schafer, and of that composer’s The Darkly Splendid Earth: The Lonely Traveler. Here are forces beyond human control, which music grasps in a way that suggests a parallel with Larry Austin’s incomprehensible sonic projection of coastlines. A mystical response to the magnificence of nature informs these pieces. And there they were: Archer and Austin, teacher and student, writing pieces a year apart for the CBC, having been brought together first some thirty years earlier in Denton, Texas, united in their awe before an unknowable vastness and in their attempts to sound out something of that unknowability.

Nexus exit.

But I barely mentioned the Divertimento for Saxophone Quartet (1979), an admirably accomplished work, or the Ten Folksongs for Four Hands (1953), by turns attractive and quirky, or “Red River” (from the choral cycle Landscapes), the piece from the album I’ve now listened to the most. Well. May life provide us all with more opportunities to hear the world’s Violet Archers and to come to understand that they may well have walked the same hallways we did.

 

[1] Thomas Clark and Larry Austin, “Coasts: On the Creative Edge with Composer Larry Austin,” Computer Music Journal 13, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 21-35.

 

The Human Presence in Schafer’s Soundscape-Concertos

“Well, there’s another completely cool thing I knew nothing about.”

This was my feeling after hearing Tyler Kinnear’s paper on R. Murray Schafer’s The Princess of Stars (1981), an opera that is meant to be performed (and has been several times) on a lake. Hearing excerpts from the work, the sound of a human voice blending with the elements, I could understand how the same person who wrote this music also coined the term soundscape. This music exists as an environment, a particular combination of the concert and natural worlds. Take the natural world away and the piece would lose a central aspect of its identity. During the paper and since, I’ve been thinking about the connection between Schafer’s Princess, part of a twelve-work cycle called Patria, and another late twentieth-century extravaganza of avant-garde opulence, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht cycle, which has an opera for each day of the week. I don’t understand the connection at the moment and am resisting the urge to search for it, in part because I think it would require digging into the twelve-part Patria in earnest, and, well. . .so many albums! As a stopgap, though, I determined to seek out all the albums with pieces by R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933) we had in the listening library, to see how they related to the extraordinary noises I heard during Tyler Kinnear’s paper.

The short answer is: There’s no short answer.

The longer answer is:

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What a remarkable composer R. Murray Schafer is that he should write something that sounded like that excerpt I heard from The Princess of the Stars and also write the three pieces on the first album I listened to: Flute Concerto (1984), Harp Concerto (1987), and The Darkly Splendid Earth: The Lonely Traveller (1991). I should perhaps say that the third of these pieces is, in the words of the composer, a “double rhapsody for violin and orchestra” – that is, not precisely but almost a concerto, even though it came about in a concerto-like way, as a commission from violinist Jacques Israelievitch. As the title suggests, there are two presences in the soundscape of the piece: the earth itself, sounded by the orchestra, and the traveler, sounded by the violinist. The liner notes to the album (credited to the composer and Robin Elliott) say nothing about the origin of the work’s title, as evocative as it is. I thought perhaps Milton, but a hesitant, wincing peek into the rabbit hole of Google search results yielded only obscure references to Zoroastrianism and to the song “Darkly Splendid World” from British band Current 93’s album Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre (1993). Perhaps the origin of the title is very obvious, but somehow I doubt the piece’s connection to either of these eyebrow-raising finds, either as descendant or influence.

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The other possibility that occurred to me as inspiration for the title was Rousseau’s Meditations of a Solitary Walker (1776-8), which in my mind always suggests Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808-10). Arguably the spirit of Schafer’s double rhapsody is poised between these two works. In Friedrich’s painting, the human is anonymous, voiceless, insignificant in the face of the vast and unknowable. In Rousseau, we are invited to “walk along with” the solitary writer, to trace the steps of his thought as he observes the world. In Friedrich, we never find the human; in Rousseau, we never escape him. Schafer’s violin is in a sense a Rousseau sort of presence, rhapsodizing, yes, in ways virtuosic and expressive, lyrical, fiery – really, in all those ways that we expect the violin to behave in a twentieth-century concerto. The surprise comes with the orchestra’s part of the double rhapsody, which often seems to operate according to entirely different principles. The darkly splendid earth inhabits this soundscape but is not subservient to the traveler in terms of texture or material. Its climaxes need not involve the violin at all, even as an obbligato element, and they need not respect the sovereignty of the soloist by getting out of the way. This is a darkly splendid earth like Friedrich’s rendering of the sea. According to the notes, the unconventional relationship between soloist and orchestra was even more pronounced in the first draft of the piece. I find myself wondering what the experience of it is like in live performance. Does the violinist seem like the monk before the orchestral sea, staring up into the ether to the backdrop of fathomless churning?

The other two pieces on the album would seem to have a much less obvious connection to the Schafer of Princess of the Stars. First, they are called concertos, and each has the traditional three movements. The album notes point out that the Flute Concerto from 1984 was only Schafer’s second work to bear that generic title, the first being the Concerto for Harpsichord and Eight Wind Instruments from 1954. So, after a thirty-year gap, Schafer came back to. . . classical form. This is a different sort of soundscape, maybe not something that Schafer would even identify as such: a sort of soundscape of the mind comprised of an inheritance of works. Here the individual concerto stands in relationship to its own ocean of repertory, which inevitably threatens to subsume any individual concerto. Are we hearing an enactment of genre or a single work? What we hear is, of course, the tension between those two options. I’ll mention just one aspect of each concerto that gripped me, that seemed to claim a certain independence.

In the Flute Concerto, this happened in the slow second movement, by far the longest of the three. The album notes point out that the movement “uses microtonal pitch inflections in imitation of [Asian] music.” Nothing more specific than that. But in the cadenza at the very end of the work, the flute (played by Robert Aitken, who commissioned the work) unmistakably evokes the shakuhachi, a sound that the listener has not been prepared for in any specific way but that points to an important source of extended techniques for the contemporary flutist – i.e., world flutes – and to the international and arguably intercultural orientation of avant-garde music in the last quarter of the twentieth century and beyond.

In the Harp Concerto, what gripped me was the identity of the principal motive that runs through the entire work. (Nexus entry.) I think it’s difficult to ignore that the motive powerfully resembles the one that opens the concluding March from Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943). Could this possibly be a coincidence? Given the popularity of Hindemith’s work, I don’t see how. That other evocations seem to be scattered through the work – echoes of Bartók, Britten, Beethoven, possibly of Berlioz – suggests that the weight of the concert inheritance was very much on Schafer’s mind when writing the work. It is such an attractive work, but it’s hard to conceive that this is the composer of the opera on the lake. Perhaps Schafer is simply supremely good at wearing different hats. Or perhaps the symphonic repertory itself is functioning as a sort of environment that soloist and ensemble inhabit and traverse. It is their darkly splendid earth. (Nexus exit.) However conceived, the concerto seems to have been a useful form for Schafer to continue to explore the relationship between the individual voice and that voice’s inevitable participation in a larger soundscape. And now Patria’s on my ever larger listening list. . .