833162

A View from the Piano Bench or Playing John Zorn's Carny for Fun and ProfitAuthor(s): Stephen DrurySource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 1994), pp. 194-201Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/833162 .

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A VIEW FROM THE PIANO BENCH OR

PLAYING JOHN ZORN'S CARNT FOR FUN AND PROFIT

STEPHEN DRURY

MOST PERFORMERS WORTH THEIR SALT (which unfortunately rules out a

great many making their living on the concert stage) relish a composer's challenge and prefer to sink their teeth and digits into a musical stew rich enough to reward hours of study and repeated performances with new and changing flavors, insights, and experiences. One measure of a composition can be the number, variety, and interrelationships of these flavors-its complexity. The risk lies in confusing a profusion of notes with a depth of musical substance.

I come to this issue as a pianist who has performed and/or recorded some of the longest and most overspilling-with-notes pieces in the modern repertoire: Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies, Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, Charles Ives's Concord Sonata, John Cage's Etudes Australes. At the same time, I don't consider



A View from the Piano Bench

myself a specialist in contemporary music (although I do notice a lot of performers out there who appear to specialize in music written before 1910). What could possibly have possessed me to devote a year of my life to learning Night Fantasies? (How many of the Beethoven sonatas could I have learned in that time?) More crucially for all you composers out there, under what circumstances can a composer reasonably expect me to be willing to devote that much time and energy to learning his or her- your-composition?

Leonard Bernstein is reputed to have asked when shown a new score, "Will it give me an orgasm?" (I'm satisfied if the piece just helps me pick up girls. .. .) What most performers want from a composition is an engagement on some emotional or visceral level that includes both the composer's ideas and the audience's perception. For the performer, complexity generally translates into technical difficulty. The staggering technical demands offered by some compositions seem almost to stand in the way of this engagement and difficulty becomes an end in itself, rather than an expressive tool.

The expressive content must be equal to or greater than the technical demands.

A musical composition is an artwork which has an existence indepen- dent of any performances. As such, it maintains its own symmetries, sig- nificances, and integrity. But don't be surprised when you have trouble interesting audiences or performers if you hide an excessive number of obscurities or subtleties in your music. Night Fantasies encompasses great emotional depth, variety, and intricacy of construction. It is a piece I love and a piece I love to play. The textures, colors, melodies, and sheer variety are readily appreciated by an audience. The broad outlines and shapes play off each other with a basic simplicity. But the act of performing the piece raises a difficult problem. I have sat with a good friend who listens frequently and attentively to a great deal of contemporary music but is not a trained musician and watched him struggle in vain to pick out some of the basic rhythmic counterpoints in Night Fantasies-a piece he enjoys and has heard me play a number of times (both live and on recording). All that work. ... In Marcel Duchamp's With Hidden Noise, a small object unknown even to the artist has been placed inside a ball of twine. The object rattles slightly when shaken. This is a marvelous conceptual tease, akin to some of the documentary/process compositions of Gavin Bryars. But there comes a point of diminishing returns, especially if the composer labors under the belief that the audience will have the desire, skill, and time to pull apart the ball of musical twine to take a peek inside. My audiences are not made up principally of specialists with such capabil- ities-nor would I wish them to be.

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Perspectives of New Music

Increasingly complex language drives art towards greater obscurity. Noting the critical response to early performances of The Perilous Night, music for prepared piano of relatively simple outlines, John Cage com- mented that we seem to be living in a musical tower of Babel. On the other hand, Charles Ives defended Brahms's orchestrations against the charge of muddiness: "if it should seem less so, he might not be saying what he thought. The mud may be a form of sincerity which demands that the heart be translated, rather than handed around through the pit. A clearer scoring might have lowered the thought." Muddiness, how- ever, can also be used by the less scrupulous to cover up a poverty of meaning. It's easy to pander to the masses with the clarity of a Tchai- kovsky, a Vivaldi, or a Glass. But is there any greater meaning hiding behind the thicket of notes in any number of serialist/academic works from the last thirty or forty years? The intricate construction of a piece may become such a densely interwoven mass that it has no meaning to anyone besides the composer and those who have done an analysis of the piece. Specialists.

We have reached a point in the evolution of musical language where the selection of specific pitches or rhythms no longer carries much signi- ficance. Let's face it: as far as the audience, the performers, or anyone besides some classroom theorist is concerned, any given pitch in even a masterwork like Boulez's Repons could be randomly changed with no appreciable impact.

Extreme complexity, unsupported by a complementing simplicity, becomes the most simple thing of all: boredom. Immensely complex works such as the scherzo movement of Ives's Fourth Symphony or Carter's Night Fantasies succeed when they trace a clear enough outline to take the listener on a journey through the forest of notes to an encounter with the heart of the piece. Highlighting this outline while managing the nuances and complexities is the great joy and the great challenge of performing much music from our century. To answer Mil- ton Babbitt's editor's question: I care if you listen. And I'm the one a composer depends on for performances.

John Zorn's Carny, written for me, Yvar Mikhashoff, and Anthony deMare under a grant from Meet the Composer, is in some respects the most complex piece of music I have performed-a complexity not just of notes, but of meanings and inferences as well. More than simply a succes- sion of fragments and styles (some of astonishing difficulty), Carny is an implosion of references in which the meaning of each gesture collides with both the image of its source in the listener's memory and its juxtapositions in the piece as a whole. In Carny there are at least three differ- ent kinds of music. Brief chunks of music by composers from Mozart to

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A View from the Piano Bench 197

Boulez appear note for note or under various degrees of transformation. (Chopin and Schonberg, for example are quoted in reverse; Stockhausen is overlaid with Bart6k; and a left hand passage from Night Fantasies is paired with an entirely new right hand part.) Secondly, phrases referring more generally to genres appear (a little New Orleans funk, some boogie- woogie, a bit of cocktail piano). And there are entirely original passages which have no outside source.

The first hint of this stylistic variety comes at bar 13 (Example 1) with the appearance of a jazzy dominant ninth chord, an unexpected and comical breath of fresh air clearing away the atonal dissonances of the first fifty seconds. For a while the music stays more or less tonal in vocab- ulary (if not in syntax), evolving through a bebop phrase (colored with Xenakis) into out-and-out cocktail music at bar 19. Soon there are hints of Messiaen, Boulez, Feldman, and Copland peeking through the textures.

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Each fragment-quote, genre reference, or abstract-affects the way we hear what follows and what came before. Previously unimaginable connections appear between Mozart and bebop. Stockhausen negates Fats Waller. Carny, in its juxtapositions, says difficult things in as simple a manner as possible.

Listen to how it moves. Carny accelerates and hesitates in broad yet unpredictable outlines much like Night Fantasies, now coming to points of near stasis, now reving up gradually, now scurrying off, now erupting in a frenzy.

And what is the listener to make of the nuclear holocaust that occurs just before the coda (bar 196) about ten minutes into the piece? (See Example 2.)

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What light does it cast on the preceding furious pile-up of Liszt, Carter, Nancarrow, cartoon music, Ives, and Art Tatum? Are we now paying dearly for the previous fun and games? Or is this apocalyptic cli- max just another cartoon mushroom cloud?

Just before the end, I find a moment of indisputable heroism. Bars 215 and 216 (Example 3, at about 11 '20") are a rewrite of music from the

198




opening of Ives's Concord Sonata. In the Ives, an opening ascent reaches a peak and cascades downward to discover the motive borrowed from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. This arch serves as an overture to the entire forty-five-minute sonata. In Carny, the cascade, standing alone, becomes a culmination and an apotheosis, turning upward at the last moment. This gesture evokes the epic struggle of Concord for those who know that piece and calls up its spirit even for those who do not.

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Carny cannibalizes mouthfuls of previously existing piano music. In turn, the introduction to Carny cannibalizes the rest of the piece. Like a CD player on fast forward, the music zips past unrelated chords ripped from the body of the work. (This minioverture summarizes both the material and the process of Carny.) The piece is informed by modern technology. The violent lurching from style to style is reminiscent of nothing so much as zapping from channel to channel on cable TV, and Zorn's use of quotation is closer in spirit to rap music than to Ives. Com- posers have long enjoyed the pleasure of quotation (Schumann quotes from himself, referring to a phrase from Papillons in Carnaval) and our own century positively revels in quotation. Rap music makes a trademark fetish out of electronic quotation-sampling-and triggers a listener's whole experience of and history with a song heard any number of times over the radio or in concert in various situations like a smell triggering a whole set of memories, thus playing fast and loose with the whole uni- verse of pop culture. Ultimately, is there or can there be a justification within the artwork itself for all these references and quotations? I dunno. Art is always ahead of theory.

199




Is it necessary to recognize these references to Copland, Stockhausen, and Fats Waller? Absolutely not. Obviously, the more knowledge a listener brings to a piece of music, the more rewarding the listening experience. But I have performed Carny from Manizales, Colombia to Missoula, Montana to enthusiastic audience response. They grasp the meaning of the piece, its gestures and attitudes. I have performed Carny now over a dozen times, and I expect it will be picked up by a great number of pianists as it becomes available. As a performer, I find the finger- twisting complexities within various fragments of Carny as rewarding as the complexity of the juxtapositions themselves-because they are always audible to an audience listening in good faith. What listener could fail to appreciate the slapstick wit of Mozart's dialogue with Carter in bars 67- 79 (Example 4, around 3'30 "-4'00 ")?

True musical complexity is not measured by the number of notes but by the number of fronts on which a piece of music encounters its audience. The intricate pitch designs of Webern and Boulez are one such front. The purest minimalism creates a confrontation with and contemplation of the act of observing-the aesthetic activity-much as Fellini's 81 and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer contemplate the process of artis- tic production. The interwoven patterns of African drumming, salsa rhythms, or bebop lines involve the audience and engage the performers' skills. They tickle the mind and ear as well as shake the booty. Scott Michaelsen has pointed out that in the music of John Cage "enlightenment is endlessly proximate and endlessly deferred-each sound is its own sound, and yet our contemplation of this 'enlightenment' is con- stantly interrupted by the next note and the next and the next." The most complex-the best?-of such works engage the listener on multiple fronts. Boulez's Pli selon pli, Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians, Eddie Palmieri's Puerto Rico, and John Cage's Etudes Australes all offer laby- rinths of notes filled with layer upon layer of meanings. John Zorn's Carny, with its cacophony of styles, references and inferences, and its running commentary on itself, rudely shoulders its way into such com- pany.

The Score to Carny is available from:

Stephen Drury 1610 Cambridge St. Cambridge, Mass. 02138 (617) 497-0823

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