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Many things have disappeared in the last few years, among them, in increasing order of importance, The Upholstered Playpen, the NEA and, most sorely missed, Bob Black. We still have an embattled culture, hounded by scapegoat politics, commercialization, LCD marketing, and the looming disaster of various social, health and environmental payables that distract some of the more attentive individuals from the happy enjoyment of their cultural soul. It is hard to enjoy a night at the opera when the patient is headed for intensive care.
And there are the soldiers, who fight on the margins to keep the pot simmering, new things, new music, new ideas. As Bob used to say, someone has to do it. So PRISM will stay in the ring for another round. Funding patterns have changed, and artistic fund seekers' behavior patterns have changed, also. This is a good thing, for as our new era business leaders are wont to say, success depends on fluidity, flexibility, mobility of labor and the ability to instantly re-tool.
This season, PRISM did much more than just perform, it has helped to produce a transcribed score to a rare piece by Harry Partch (publishing), two compact discs (record production), and is exploring arts management techniques (fund-raising, promotion, mail-order sales) which we hope will bring PRISM and the ideas we represent into the 21st century. For example, about 80 per cent of the promotional efforts for the Partch CD were conducted on the internet, with point to point communication and promotional materials directed to very specialized markets. A world-wide web page is "under construction", with dynamic links to other related sites.
Fortunately, there are new ways to get the job done, because the old ways don't work anymore. Music isn't dead, but the music "business" as it has been practiced over the past 15 years is. The real catch is figuring out how to survive, and from the looks of what has been accomplished this year, I think we are on the right track. The real hope, after all, is to survive, and keep "product" flowing, so that the independent, original voices we represent are not paved over by the macro economic and cultural trends threatening to homogenize all of us. [TM]
PRISM PROJECTS...
RECORDINGS (FALL '95)
* 17 Lyrics of Li Po, by Harry Partch (Tzadik Records, TZ7012, release date 11/5/95) PRISM raised funds and coordinated promotional efforts for this extremely important release of previously unrecorded material by an American pioneer composer.
* The Art of Robert Black, (Bridge Records, BCD 9061, release date mid-December, 1995) PRISM raised funds (partial funding for this project was provided by the Mary Cary Flagler Charitable Trust), and provided direct production assistance for this recording. The disc will feature three compositions by Mr. Black: Three Pieces for Violin and Piano (1991/92) Gregory Fulkerson, violin and Charles Abramovic, piano; Foramen Habet! (1992) James Winn, piano; Capriccio (Blown Apart) (1993) Warsaw Philharmonic. The disc also contains an archival PRISM performance of Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks", with Mr. Black conducting.
CHAMBER MUSIC CONCERT PRODUCTION (FALL '95)
* LEONARDO TRIO in concert at Merkin Hall, 10/31/95 The program featured a work by William Thomas McKinley, with the Schubert Bb Trio and the Smetana G-minor Trio.
* PRISM PLAYERS, a flexible-sized ensemble, presenting concerts that fulfill goals envisioned by founder Robert Black: performing works of living composers, providing a forum for innovative works and artists, offering professional opportunities for developing young conductors and instrumentalists. Phoenix Rising..., a concert produced on November 18 at the historic St. Peter's Church in Chelsea. The program commemorated PRISM's inaugural concert with a performance of the Brahm's Serenade in A, which Mr. Black conducted on March 13, 1984, celebrated the Hindemith centenary with Der Schwanendreher, featuring Karen Dreyfus (an original member of the PRISM roster!), featured the emerging young conductor Jeff Domoto, and a new work, Conga Line in Hell, by Miguel del Aguila.
UPCOMING CONCERTS
* ROGER ZAHAB/ERIC MOE, this violin/piano duo of performing composers will be presenting a program of new works for violin and piano. (TBA)
* PRISM PLAYERS: Music of Weimar Germany (Hindemith, Krenek and Weill) April 15, 1996 at St. Peter's Church. Music of Terezin: a recreation of the September 1, 1944 concert (Dvorak's Serenade for Strings and works by Pavel Haas and Joseph Suk), with a recently discovered work by a Terezin composer.
* MARY ROWELL: In the 1996-7 season PRISM will present former concertmaster Mary Rowell in a downtown performance designed to propel the violin into the 21st Century. PRISM audiences will remember her 1991 performance of Arvo Pärt's Fratres with Robert Black at the piano. Last season she fascinated the dance world with her performances on electric violin for Ulysess Dove's new ballet Red Angels. This new event will feature a set of Variations for Electric Violin based on a theme of Paganini-the variations will be written for Rowell by numerous composers including Richard Einhorn, Scott Johnson, and Michael Levine. Mary also promises a Jerry Garcia tribute.
NEW RECORDING PROJECTS:
* MUSIC OF MATHEW ROSENBLUM, a project for Mode Records, produced by PRISM President Ted Mook, featuring a large-scale chamber work for mixed ensemble, two voices and electronics, Nü Kuan Tzu , and Ancient Eyes, for mixed ensemble. PRISM will assist with fund-raising, coordinate production and artistic personnel.
Nü Kuan Tzu is a formidable, 35 minute work commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992 (when there still was an NEA). It is scored for soprano, mezzo-soprano and eleven instruments. The textual make-up of the piece is perhaps its most distinguishing characteristic. The work uses source texts from Sung Dynasty "music poems" in combination with poems by Appolinaire and Rimbaud. Digitally sampled texts are interwoven with the live singers. Each movement of the 11 movement work is very different stylistically and ranges from impressionism to microtonal to pop. It has never been performed live in its entirety.
* Patterns in a Chromatic Field, by Morton Feldman, for Tzadik Records, with Ted Mook (cello) and Stephen Drury (piano). PRISM will assist with funding, pre-production and promotional efforts.
NEW VENTURES:
* Web Site: PRISM is developing a Web page on the Internet, fully linked to related pages and institutions, taking advantage of point-to-point direct communication for publicity, direct sale information and business correspondence. Expected to be up by December, 1995.
* Direct and Mail Order sale of CDs and scores.
* Scores of Robert Black (contact the office for details: (212) 741-0011)
Foramen Habet! for piano
Three Pieces for Violin and Piano
Capriccio (Blown Apart) for orchestra:
3222-4231-pno/cel-3 perc-strings
Underground Judges for orchestra
3342-4331-timp+4-strings
* The Art of Robert Black, (Bridge Records, BCD 9061) $14 plus $2 for shipping and handling, checks/money order only.
The 17 Lyrics of Li Po, released in November, was a major success. We thank all of you who helped to make it possible. If it is not available at your local record store, and your passionate complaints do not provide results, order direct from PRISM. Send a check or money order for $14 (per disc) and $2 for shipping and handling to: PRISM, c/o Elm, 411 W 21st Street, New York, 10011-2950.
NOTES:
"I am first and last a composer. I have been provoked into becoming a musical theorist, and instrument builder, a musical apostate, and a musical idealist, simply because I have been a demanding composer. I hold no wish for the obsolescence of the widely heard instruments and music. My devotion to our musical heritage is great -- and critical. I feel that more ferment is necessary for a healthy musical culture. I am endeavoring to instill more ferment." --Harry Partch 1942
In 1930, the composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) broke with Western European tradition and forged a new music based on a more primal, corporeal integration of the elements of speech, rhythm and performance using the intrinsic music found in the spoken word, the principles of acoustic resonance and just-intonation. Borrowing from the intonation systems of the ancient Greeks, he created a scale of 43-tones per octave, in part to enable him to capture the nuances of speech in his music, and to forge purer harmony.
His unique ideas forced him to become a theorist, an inventor of musical instruments and a brilliant spokesman for his ideas. Living on the fringes of society, he was ignored by the standard musical institutions, although after reading some of his more barbed criticisms of musical culture one can understand how his presence might have disrupted the smooth indoctrination of good musical soldiers. He rejected ossified concert traditions, the 12-tone equal-temperament scale and the idea of "pure" or abstract concert music. He redefined the roles of the performing musician, composer and by extension, even the role of music in society . His body of work is rigorously constructed, sensual, alluring and emotional, and, sad to say, almost impossible to hear live, since it requires Partch's own invented instruments to be performed.
The Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po were composed between 1931 and 1933 and are among Partch's earliest extant compositions. They were composed for Intoning Voice and Partch's Adapted Viola, a hybrid instrument consisting of a cello neck grafted onto the body of a viola, its open strings sounding one octave below the violin. He used texts from the eighth century Chinese poet, Li Po, selected from Shigeyoshi Obata's 1928 English translation, The Works of Li Po, the Chinese Poet.
In Partch's own words:
"The Lyrics by Li Po are set to music in the manner of the most ancient of cultured musical forms. In this art, the vitality of spoken inflection is retained in the music, every syllable and inflection of the spoken expression being harmonized by the accompanying instrument. The music accompaniment, or, more properly, complement, in addition to being a harmonization, is an enhancement of the text-mood and frequently a musical elaboration of ideas expressed" ...from Partch's liner notes for six of the Li Po settings for an acetate recording
In this recording, the instrument used in place of the Adapted Viola is a tenor violin, a member of the new Violin family of instruments, invented, built and maintained by Carlene Hutchins of the Catgut Acoustical Society. The tenor violin has the identical tuning of Partch's Adapted Viola, with the advantage of a greater string length and a larger, more resonant body, better suited to the instrument's range.
This is the first recording of all seventeen of Partch's Lyrics of Li Po. The project was arduous. Written transcriptions from Partch's original notation were prepared, an instrument that could duplicate the range of Partch's Adapted Viola was found, a suitable way of achieving the flattened bridge effect was rigged (Partch calls for a flattened bridge in several of the songs, allowing the simultaneous sounding of three strings), and the laborious process of making sense out of Partch's meticulous notation was begun. Since there are almost no notated rhythms in the entire piece, every interpretive choice was threaded between
two known excesses: to not submerge the text in a wash of "bel canto vowels", and other "devitalized tricks of 'serious
singing'", and to not slight Partch's careful harmonies.
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Harry Partch's
Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po
Tzadik (TZ7012)
Stephen Kalm, Voice
Ted Mook, tenor violin
Produced by Ted Mook
Executive Producer: John Zorn
Recorded at Sound on Sound Studio July 15, 1995
Dave Amlen engineer, TK assistant engineer
Edited and Mastered by Allan Tucker at Foothill Digital, NYC Sept. 8, 1995.
HIGHLIGHT ON STEPHEN KALM:
Baritone Stephen Kalm has sung with many of America's leading regional opera companies and symphony orchestras, including the Houston Grand Opera, Chautauqua Opera, Lake George Opera Festival, Minnesota Opera, Connecticut Opera, The Pennsylvania Opera Theater, and the Milwaukee, Springfield, and Billings Symphony Orchestras. Among his roles performed are Figaro in The Barber of Seville, Marcello in La Boheme, Papageno in The Magic Flute, and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Internationally, Mr. Kalm received critical acclaim for his solo's in Orff's Carmina Burana with the Filharmonica de Bogota, as the Subjective Voice in Harry Partch's US. Highball with Newband in Berlin, and creating the role of Franco Hartmann in Meredith Monk's Atlas, which he has also recorded for ECM. He can also be heard on New World Records' Ponder Nothing, singing Five Fragments by Ben Johnston. Mr. Kalm teaches voice and directs the opera workshop at the University of Montana.
The following statement comes from a booklet,Photographs of Instruments Built by Harry Partch and Heard in His Recorded Music
It is inherent in the being of the creative art worker to know and understand the materials he needs, and to create them where they do not exist, to the best of his ability. In music, this characteristic must go far beyond the mere competence to compose and analyze a score. It is more difficult for the composer to create the colors of needed sound than it is for the painter to create the colors of needed light, but it is no less important that he find it possible to do so. The usual musical traditions are against him in the effort, in our time they are recognizable as traditions only when they have reached the comfortable plateau of academic security. But the rebelliously creative act is also a tradition, and if our art of music is to be anything more than a shadow of its past, the traditions in question must periodically shake off dominant habits and excite themselves into palpable growth.
If one must have the feeling of historical respectability beneath him in order to function, our world provides it in myriad variety, beyond the immediate local, before the immediate past. He does not need to become an archeologist to realize that there is hardly an exotic line he could write, a variant article he could create, or a singular idea he could brew, that would be not felicitous in some tradition, at some point on the globe, at some conjectured time in the cultural past. My instruments belong to many traditions, especially including the present one: affirmation of parentage provides the primary substance of rebellion.
There tuning is based on the 43-tone-to-the-octave system of acoustic-- not equal-- intonation, which is explained in by book, Genesis of a Music, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1949. A new range of melodic resources, a new series of tonal relationships, and a new perspective on consonance and dissonance are all implicit in the system.. Beyond these severely definable ideas is the music itself, elusive to words, I call corporeal, because it roots itself with other arts necessary to civilization, in a unity that is important to the whole being-- mind and body. Even the visual element of seeing the instruments played is a vital one.
I began designing and building instruments nearly forty years ago. Five of those represented here are explained in my book. The other have been built since the time of that publication. All have been built and rebuilt-- one of them seven times-- to improve quality. No two are exactly alike. I am not an instrument builder, but a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry. H.P.-- June, 1962
(c)1996 Prism Chamber Orchestra
The Upholstered Playpen is a sporadically published newsletter on the musical arts and the activities of PRISM. To contact the editors directly, please use the address in the masthead or try: tmook@mindspring.com
OR elm@interport.net. Non commercial usage is encouraged, pets not permitted (sorry) and batteries not included. Caveat lector. over and out.
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