Hardly avant-garde at all

June 23, 10:38 AMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

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I was having a schmooz with a good friend/colleague (who happens to be a well-known composer) not too long ago, and our conversation turned to the recent passing on of a vastly influential American composer, whom I shall identify as Joe Schmoe. My colleague had an idea about the proper obsequies for our departed American giant.

His proposal: we organize a comprehensive festival in which every single work by Joe Schmoe is performed after intensive, careful rehearsal by first-rate artists. Every last jot and tittle gets played to the nines. At festival's close, we lead the audience out into a wide field, with the entire collection of Joe Schmoe music — published and in manuscript — in tow.

And there we burn it.

Thus we've done our duty: we've played it all very well. But that's the end, finis, kaput, pfffffffft.

I can well imagine any number of readers grinning and thinking: "Ooh, great idea!" and assembling a mental list of composers whose output would be immeasurably improved by such treatment. Others might contemplate the purchase of a poisonous spider to mail off to me as a birthday present. (Even if I'm just reporting somebody else's idea.)

A lot of folks are irreparably damaged by certain trends in 20th century music, in which sophisticated organizational techniques produced music that reminds one of the sounds wafting up from medieval torture chambers. Composers who visited audiences with such onslaughts deserve to be held properly accountable; safe in their academic ivory towers they turned a deaf ear to the protests of performers and listeners alike, and cast a blind eye on their ever-dwindling audience numbers. Our Joe Schmoe guy was one such composer.

But the baby tends to get thrown out with the bathwater. Once you decide that all composers writing after about 1945 don't have a doggone thing to offer, then you close your ears to the possibilities of hearing something truly worthwhile from a contemporary writer.

This past week the San Francisco Symphony performed Magnus Lindberg's Seht die Sonne, a beautiful and fascinating piece of music from a compelling modern Finnish composer. At least I was enthralled by it, anyway. But I heard two fellows nearby chatting during the break, agreeing that the Lindberg sounded like the orchestra tuning up for half an hour.

Well, no, it didn't, not at all. But I can understand the reaction. The modern world has produced an appalling amount of sonic hokum.

This week the SF Symphony plays Mi-Parti by Witold Lutoslawski, a major European composer who died in 1994 and whose career spans the era from WWII onwards. To be sure it might be very easy to toss Lutoslawski into the same bin as a lot of hardcore academic avant-garde composers: he did employ some of those buzzword modernist techniques such as serialism (ordering pitches in predetermined patterns), aleatoric music (composer-controlled improvisation) and atonality (i.e., writing without a definite tonal center that provides the center of gravity for a work.)

But Lutoslawski was not any kind of technical formalist; he was a musician, a composer of exquisite sensibility who created soundscapes of breathtaking beauty and interest. His goals were always musical, never technical; he used whatever tools seemed appropriate for the task at hand. Yet, he has a good ways to go before his work will be fully accepted by the concert-going public — but I for one am pretty confident that his work will pass into the standard repertory.

We have a lot of first-hand documentation available on Lutoslawski. For one thing, he was a fine conductor and therefore we can both hear and see him interpreting his own music. Here's a video of him conducting his "Chain I" in England.

EMI offers up a very fine assortment of Lutoslawski conducting his own compositions; the beautifully-remastered set is easily available on CD, or as a download from the usual sources (see my lists to the left.)

Of interest: The San Francisco Symphony performs Witold Lutoslawski's Mi-Parti with conductor David Robertson; the program also includes the Dvórak Cello Concerto and works by Janacek. The program notes for the Lutoslawski are by yours truly, and can be read online here if you would like to bone up a bit in advance.