Kurt Gottschalk: Art of Music & Ideas (review)
Publikováno: 3.5.2023
Art of Music & Ideas
Czech – American – Czech
April 20, 2023 – Don Buchwald Theater, Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn College
April 21, 2023 – Bohemian National Hall, Czech Center NY
In 1997, Petr Kotik organized the Festival of Music of Extended Duration in Prague at the invitation of Vaclav Havel, eight concerts compositions lasting more than an hour. One concert, with the Janacek Philharmonic, included works by John Cage, Vlastislav Matoušek and Pauline Oliveros, who was present to lead her Four Meditations for Orchestra.
‘It was very touching, very deep’, Petr Kotik told the audience at the second night of his recent Art of Music & Ideas: Czech – American – Czech at the Bohemian National Hall in New York City. ‘I’ll never forget being on the stand, the orchestra is practically all male and very few people were sympathetic to what we were doing. And then comes an older lady facing those 100 people who were staring with an accordion and sits in front of the orchestra with a great deal of security and knowing what she was doing’.
Kotik revisited that earlier concert with one of Oliveros’s four meditations and in so doing implied many lines, some no doubt missed by some part of the audience (some, likely, missed by this reporter as well). He suggested lines between America and Europe, lines into extended duration, lines to the breaking of convention, and lines back to Cage by way of Oliveros, two of the greatest listeners of the 20th Century.
The Tuning Meditation is a magical piece, true to Oliveros’s spirit. There’s no way to know how it will come out, but by virtue of three simple instructions to the musicians—listen quietly, play a pitch you don’t hear in the room or play a pitch someone else is playing—it is guaranteed to sound like her work. The presence of a soloist might run counter to those three rules, but saxophonist Erin Rogers infused into it a sense of discovery that seemed altogether germane.
It was the first of two nights of ideas. Rogers aside, soloists were few. The music was generally about the mass of the ensemble. Philip Glass’s Two Pages opened the first night, and stood out because it was only two players. But even then, and as demanding as it was to play, it was about the ideas on the page, not the artistic interpretation of the performance. Two Pages was originally scored for piano and electric organ and later for ensemble. (It has also been reworked for other configurations—Matthew Welch’s arrangement for solo bagpipes and the Bang on a Can ensemble recording are both worth seeking out.) Here it was played on piano and celesta with laudable precision, hypnotic in its broken repetitions. It made for a nice preamble for what was to be a long first night, crossing not just the ocean but six decades of minimalism, even pre-minimalism, musical structuralism and extended forms
Jan Rychlík’s African Cycle, which followed the Glass, was composed in 1961 for Kotik’s ensemble, and was the oldest piece presented over the two nights. It’s an early example of phase composition in Western music, inspired by African drumming and predating Steve Reich’s experiments by a number of years. With Kotik again conducting, it still retained something of the “concert music” formalism that Americans especially at the time were trying to break down, even with the African inspiration. Built around what could be a Ravel phrase, the piece quickly did things that Ravel would not have dared, a dramatically repeating French horn glissando with bassoon then trombone extending its direction while flutes and reeds danced above and piano pounded soft and slow like detuned bongos. Eventually, everything fell away, leaving a single repeating bassoon line. The second of the two movements was more complex, piano percussion with low reeds underscoring. It was a rare opportunity to hear this piece, indeed to hear Rychlík, in New York City, and representative of the absolutely unique and underappreciated position Kotik holds in New York, a living link between post-war East European experimentation and the New York School of Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff and stretching beyond that, in fact, to composers of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (founded in Chicago not long after Kotik first played Rychlík’s composition) most often associated with the jazz tradition.
Or to the American-born Frederic Rzewski, for that matter. His Les Moutons de Panurge (1969) was inspired by the Paris metro. Kotik conducted it and played flute, the pace precisely set by Chris Nappi on snare, with a heroic theme sweeping across the orchestra. (Rzewski may have written countless fanfares for the common man but he was always given to heroic themes.) There was a blurriness in the momentum, like watching one moving train while sitting on another moving at a different speed, which may or may not have been written into the score. The tempi dynamics were dizzying, even confusing, and exhilarating.
Kotik also conducted Phil Niblock’s Petr’s Charm—composed in 2021 and named for Kotik—extending his arms like the hands of a clock, counting not beats but minutes. The piece itself was, perhaps, a drone but more like a swarm of sonic activity, busy with internal movement even as it stayed, circling, in one place.
Jana Vöröšová’s 2021 Oratio Phillipica, with Jiří Rožeň conducting, was a fascinating, strangely beautiful piece for six strings, flute, oboe and percussion, and very nearly a cello soloist within the echoing strings. The piece confronted ideas like beauty and bravura more directly than most of the program, and Vörösová’s phraseology fell nicely into a new arrangement of Roscoe Mitchell’s signature work, which it preceded. Mitchell has been a key figure of Chicago’s AACM and has often had his work presented by Kotik. His Nonaah is an evocative and mystifying piece of music, no matter the configuration, from solo saxophone to various band lineups to this deep and resonant realization for a full orchestra that included harp, tuba and four percussionists, and was a more exacting performance from a “jazz man” than the smears of Rzewski.
Composer Petr Bakla has been a regular presence at the Ostrava Days festival Kotik founded, and his 2017 Elsewhere began the second evening with long lines and rich harmonies, immediately setting the evening off from the previous night. Slow circles started in the strings, then arose in the brass, reeds hovering somewhere in between until the orchestra split magnificently into upper and lower extremes. The music was thick with feeling but only very slowly did anything like a thematic statement emerge, and then at a glacial speed, despite the midtempo clip set Rožeň.
More profundity was heard in František Chaloupka’s The Witch Waltzers (2023), something from which Americans composers tend to shy. A dramatic pulse with shafts of sonic light, first flickering but soon unobscured, and like both light and intellect, it was brilliant. The second movement built unexpectedly to a mélange of trills, then receded into almost an almost elegiac theme.
There was no Cage or Feldman on the program, but the youngest of the New York School, the ever enigmatic Wolff, was represented with his mysterious Trust (2012) full of deliberate and bold phrases and rhythm and outbursts and silences, ending in a quick military march (or so it seemed). Pavel Zemek Novák’s Quartet No. 3 composed in 1998 in memory of the political protester Evžen Plocek and scored for violin, viola cello and clarinet, was lyrical and sentimental, like Schubert on a restless night.
Kotik’s stunning Nine+1 (2013–14) made for a stunning conclusion, with pounding piano and drum and pizzicato strings all seeming to drill home some point not made with words, And in its midst emerged a violin so lovely, it seemed as if melody were the defiant one, as if we were being dared to try to listen to music the way people did 150 years, 250 years ago, or at least to try, against the current of the other instruments. The other instruments, including a relentless snare drum, worked to erase any such notion.
Five hours of music in two nights might be a lot, although not an insurmountable lot, but the sheer amount of sonic information imparted could take a week or more to process. And beyond Kotik as composer, conductor, producer, promoter and flutist, the concerts provided opportunity to witness Kotik as percussionist, playing flexatone with sheer determination in Rudolf Komorous’s 1964 Olympia (dog whistle and melodica were also employed). A little Fluxus spirit can be a breath of fresh air in such a program of demanding listening.
Kurt Gottschalk
