My Retro Variations received its world premiere on Tuesday, November 26 by the Oberlin Percussion Group, under the direction of Michael Rosen, at Warner Concert Hall, Oberlin College at 7:30 PM. I was honored to be commissioned by Professor Rosen, a legend in the percussion world who had just been inducted in the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame a week before. Here is a recording of the World Premiere and a photo of the ensemble with Professor Rosen at the dress rehearsal.
The Oberlin Percussion Group, Michael Rosen, Director
Dress Rehearsal of Retro Variations, Monday November 25,
Warner Concert Hall, Oberlin College and Conservatory
Retro Variations Program Note
Commissioned by Michael Rosen and the Oberlin Percussion Group
Dedicated to Michael Rosen and the Grand Legacy of Percussion
at the University of Illinois
In Memory of Michael Colgrass
(1932-2019)
Retro Variations is the second in an ongoing series of “variations,” the first being Sanjo Variations for Gayageum ensemble (2018), which was commissioned and premiered by the Gyeonggi Gayageum Ensemble. The first uses the Korean sanjo as source material. Retro Variations uses the early percussion music written in the 1930s and 1940s. I was inspired hearing a great performance by the combined Oberlin/University of Illinois percussion ensembles of Jose Ardèvol’s Suite at the Percussive Arts Society Convention in 2018. I’ve always loved the wildness of those early pieces, many of them placed in the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection in Philadelphia by John Cage in the 1940s, and I first heard and studied them (I wrote a research essay on the subject) as a graduate student at the University of Illinois. When I visited the Fleisher Collection, in preparation for a presentation about these pieces at the 1986 Percussive Arts Society International Convention, I saw in the card catalog how few people had visited previously. One of those people (no surprise to me) was Michael Rosen. I thought the many connections between Michael and I with this music (we both did graduate work at Illinois where I’m guessing we both first learned about Fleisher, Fleisher is in Philadelphia, Michael is from Philadelphia and I now live in Philadelphia) would make for a meaningful experience for me to compose and him to conduct.
In the Sanjo Variations the reference is obvious, at least to Korean audiences for whom the Sanjo melody is universally known. For the Retro Variations the references are likely not so obvious so I include them here. The form of the piece loosely follows the square root form John Cage created and used in his early percussion pieces: in Retro Variations, the piece is in three parts (with introduction and coda) using the square root of 9x9. The motives I use, with one exception, are drawn from Johanna Beyer’s IV, Lou Harrison’s Canticle No. 1 and the aforementioned Ardèvol Suite. Instrument choices, again with one exception, also harken to those early percussion pieces. And ultimately it’s that sound world that provides continued interest in those pieces. In any case it’s what influenced my composing of Retro Variations.
The one exception concerns a strange moment in the piece that seemingly appears out of nowhere: four players two each playing the “cadential” melodicle rhythm from Harrison’s Canticle on marimba and vibraphone. I had already planned to “inscribe” the pitches found in Michael Rosen’s name (BCAE), possibly in the almglocken and Thai gongs (they are used there too). But the surprise came for me, composing as I usually do in the quiet solitude of Old Haverford Friends Meeting House, and recently hearing of my friend Michael Colgrass having passed away (another Illinois percussion alum), when I decided to include his name into the mix, the added G made a C major seventh chord with an added 6th. Played on marimba and vibraphone, moving upward repetitively and by inversion, this is something one might hear in a tonal minimalist piece, performed by any number of professional percussion quartets that champion such work, but here in an homage to those early experimental pieces from the 1930s where such instruments were never used and such tonality was intentionally avoided? I was as surprised then as the audience likely will be. And yet, there it was, and is, and somehow (in a way I’m unable to explain) it “fits.” Is it drawing a continuity between two important periods of percussion music (30s, 80s); is it ironic (or maybe just humorous) that the pitches of the two Michaels insert such out of place and conventional tonality in an otherwise highly constructed but nonconventional piece? And when those instruments and pitches are swallowed up in the conclusion, where the theme from Colgrass’s own variations dominates—the atonal Fantasy Variations, my favorite piece of his, and which also uses marimba and vibraphone—what in the end does it all mean? I’ll let the listener decide.
The University of New Mexico Percussion Ensemble and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Musik im Bauch
(I wrote what follows as I was working on editing and preparing the final version of a video recording made by Dave Olive of the University of New Mexico Percussion Ensemble's performance at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention of Musik im Bauch by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It took place in Phoenix Arizona on Wednesday, November 1, 1995. Dr. Michael Bump, now a member of the Percussive Arts Society Board of Advisors, invited us in his capacity as the organizer of what was then called the New Music/Research Day. The performers were David Edwards, Beth Harcourt, Erica Jett, William Larson, Tiffany Nicely and Tracy Wiggins. Dr. Jennifer Predock-Linnell was responsible for movement and Daniel Paul Davis was in charge of on-stage sound. Rowan Stanland made Miron the Birdman If anyone has any photographs of rehearsals and concerts please send them my way and I will add them here.)
In 1994, I was living and teaching in Aachen Germany on a Fulbright guest professorship at the Institut für Anglistik, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Universität Aachen. I had just finished my Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico, the last chapter of my dissertation, "Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition," had just been selected by Mark Swed to be published in the The Musical Quarterly and, after having taught percussion at the University of New Mexico since 1980, I planned to return from my Fulbright year and announce my intention to no longer do so, opening myself up to the very real possibility that might my lose my tenure and my employment at UNM. I was a recently minted Ph.D. from a nationally ranked American Studies program, with a prestigious Fulbright and an important first publication on my resume, and my intention was to shift from teaching applied music and join the academic faculty. I've written elsewhere about those days ("Writing (at the end) of New Music" in The Modern Percussion Revolution: Journeys of the Progressive Artist, Gustavo Aquilar, Kevin Lewis, eds., Routledge, 2014) and consider there to some extent the reasons behind why I took such drastic steps back then so I won't dwell on that here. I do want to acknowledge however, as a preface to what follows, that I had an amazing group of very dedicated and talented percussion students waiting for me to return and, in some cases, students who had even postponed their graduation in order to finish their degrees under my direction.
Either while I was in Germany or not long after my return, Michael Bump (currently Professor of Percussion at Truman University) contacted me in his capacity as a member of the New Music/Research Committee that organized what was then a pre-convention day for the Percussive Arts Society International Convention. He was in charge of programming for the New Music Day at PASIC upcoming (Phoenix, Arizona, November 1995). I was involved in the beginnings of this committee, chaired it for several years, but was already "on the outs" with the organization due to their increasingly commercial leanings. In fact, the so-called "New Music Day" was a direct result of those leanings--those in charge considered what we did to be so un-commercial that we were taken out of the convention proper altogether. The pre-convention was meant to keep us away. But by 1995 it had become one of PASIC's most popular events--some irony there to be sure but at the time it was pretty much lost on those in charge, so blinded by their dislike of what the committee represented and the adventurous and experimental music it programmed.
Michael wanted to know if I would consider preparing Karlheinz Stockhausen's Musik im Bauch with my ensemble at UNM and perform it at the New Music Day in Phoenix. I immediately said yes but that answer requires some background and context. Musik im Bauch is a very eccentric and strange piece. I've always been surprised at its popularity among other percussionists. An ensemble I've written for, the Akros Percussion Collective (they commissioned my opera Lost in the Woods), does an amazing version and Crossing 32nd St, a superb group of performers based in the Phoenix area (including two of my former students Doug Nottingham and Brett Reed, who recently made a CD of my early experimental music for Neuma records), have an outstanding performance of it available on YouTube. Thomas Siwe, then director of the legendary percussion program at the University of Illinois (where I received my MM in 1981), programmed it with his percussion ensemble, possibly its American premiere. In order to do so he had to order the music boxes directly from the company in Switzerland that Stockhausen used to make all twelve. (Stockhausen had music boxes made to play harmonized melodies he composed for each sign of the Zodiac, Tierkreis, three of which one chooses in order to perform Musik im Bauch). This would have been in the early 1980s I believe. Larry Snider, who directs the now equally legendary percussion program at the University of Akron (also a student of Tom Siwe) programmed it as well, borrowing the music boxes from Tom. Those boxes, by the way, were Pisces, Aries, and Sagittarius: that's right, the acronym spells PAS. Tells you something about Tom's love of the organization, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame, a richly deserved honor, in 2011. The University of New Mexico had an fantastic music library, thanks initially to the acquisition history of Don Roberts (who left UNM to take over the music library at Northwestern University) and its continuance under the leadership of Jim Wright, the music librarian during most of my thirty-two years at UNM and who literally ordered every single thing I ever asked for, creating a superb collection of percussion music, including (as one might expect) the score to Karlheinz Stockhausen's Musik im Bauch.
So I knew of the piece, had studied it somewhat carefully, but was never really interested in performing it. In truth, I had been somewhat put off by Stockhausen in the 1980s, in part because of his obsessive concerns regarding how one should interpret his music. Stockhausen had visited The University of Michigan, where my friend Michael Udow headed the percussion program, in preparation for a commission (Luzifers Tanz, 1983) by the Wind Symphony that became part of one of his Licht operas (Samstag aus Licht). This would have been in 1984 I believe and there was an incident while Stockhausen was there where, if I'm remembering this correctly, Stockhausen directed the performers to perform Zyklus in only one way, rather than the several ways possible by reading the score. I was into following the score a composer made at the time it was composed and in every detail, that was my obsession. Stockhausen's score to Musik im Bauch simply did not interest me at the time. And I still have serious reservations about the piece (artistically, aesthetically, socially) to this day.
But when Michael contacted me, my opinion about Stockhausen and Musik im Bauch had changed thanks to my friend, the acclaimed composer and trombonist Michael Svoboda who, at the time, was performing in Stockhausen's ensemble. He invited me to attend a performance of the complete Hymnen at the Kölner Philharmonie in Cologne. The ensemble would play the outer parts and Stockhausen would conduct the orchestra part between. Stockhausen sat at the soundboard as his ensemble performed and I was lucky enough to be seated in the same row, hearing what Stockhausen heard and listening to how those amazing ears of his turned Hymnen from a recording I knew and didn't really care for that much into a live concert experience that was then, and remains to this day, one of the most incredible musical performances I've ever heard. I was so enthusiastic after the concert that I asked Mike if he could get me a ticket for the second performance and I returned the following night and listened again, even more impressed than the first time I heard the piece. After the concert I talked to Mike about Hymnen and about what it was like working with Stockhausen. He told me how long they rehearsed, in particular for the third part, which was essentially improvised but under the direct and constant supervision of Stockhausen until he heard what he wanted to hear. Mike told me they rehearsed for hours and hours (and hours) to get things exactly right. Somehow the number one hundred resonated with me--maybe because Mike told me that's how many hours they spent. Ever the generous friend, Mike later purchased a CD of Musik im Bauch and a score of Kathinka's Gesang als Luzifers Requiem, both signed by Stockhausen and sent to me as a gift.
When I returned to teach at UNM in August of 1994, I was full of my experiences in Europe, and although I was no longer teaching privately (and could no longer conduct, a specialty of mine before the performance injury that made both performing and conducting no longer possible), I immersed myself into the percussion ensemble with a fall concert that was the most difficult I had ever programmed at UNM. The program was only two pieces, either of which should have been the sole focus of a concert: the American premiere of Apocalypsis cum Figurisby Konrad Boehmer was the first half. Konrad and I became reacquainted during my year in Germany and I heard a performance of his Apocalypsisin Maastricht, after which he and I drank way too much witbier and made plans to perform and record the work in Albuquerque that fall. A memorable line from that conversation: when I asked Konrad (not having yet looked at the score) how one composes something that chaotic, he looked at me with that inimitably (and unforgettably) devilish twinkle in his eye, saying "absolute control." Sadly our entire recording session of Apocalypsis is lost. (I coached the rehearsals and recording session, with Konrad's direct participation, but Doug Nottingham conducted the performance and recording because I no longer had the stamina to do so.) But the memory of that performance, and a party at my house after that went on way too long, will never be forgotten. And that was just the first half. The second was Persephassa by Iannis Xenakis.
I could go on and on ... but just one more anecdote ... Before I left for the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Atlanta, just before our upcoming percussion ensemble concert, the final rehearsal of the Xenakis was a disaster. So bad in fact that I told the ensemble if everything wasn't fixed by the time of my return we would cancel the concert. At the convention, Tom Siwe asked me what I had programmed for our fall concert and after I told him he gave me a disapprovingly stern look and scolded me for putting such an inordinate burden on my students, that I was expecting way too much from them, intimating (or at least I took it that way) that I should be ashamed of myself for having giving them a much too arduous task. I returned home to discover that my students had practiced constantly, both individually and as a group, and were completely prepared and ready to go. My colleague and friend Richard Hermann stills talks about this concert as one of his favorites. It's one of mine too!
That academic year, instead of teaching privately, I taught academic courses for the Honors College and began teaching two new courses that were created as part of what was meant to be an interdisciplinary minor in Fine Arts, sadly never fully realized. The first, which I taught in the fall, was an overview of interdisciplinary practices called "Experiencing the Arts." The second, offered in the spring, was team-taught with colleagues from the dance department and the art department, my good friends Basia Irland and Jennifer Predock-Linnell, both of whom I had collaborated with on many occasions. I discuss my collaboration with Basia in a previous blog entry. The course gave students the opportunity to create three interdisciplinary projects and it was through our first offering of the course that Jennifer and I met Rowan Stanland, a very talented artist who was studying with Basia and the person we chose to make Miron the Bird Man for Musik im Bauch.
Musik im Bauch was the entire focus of our fall semester in 1995. Rowan was busy making Miron. Performers were carefully selected and under very strict conditions, including the signing of a document that required each student to commit to a minimum of one hundred hours of rehearsal. Tiffany Nicely was selected to play the virtuosic Klangplatten; Willie Larson and Dave Edwards the difficult and physically taxing marimba parts; Beth Harcourt, Erica Jett and Tracy Wiggins danced and performed the theatrically challenging three parts for crotales, glockenspiel and whips. Daniel Paul Davis handled the essential task of sound amplification. There had been a technical disaster at our last PASIC (Thomas DeLio's Against the Silence ... in 1988) because Dan didn't come with us and there was no way I would go anywhere without him again. He also handled sound when we performed James Tenney's Pika Don at the PASIC in Nashville the following year.
I asked Jennifer Predock-Linnell to work with us on movement and visuals, including costuming if I'm not mistaken. I knew from my collaborative work with Jennifer that she was the perfect person to assist with Musik im Bauch. She is a gifted choreographer (she once even choreographed me into a dance she made of John Cage's Child of Tree) and it was amazing to watch her patiently work through the thirty-plus minutes of Stockhausen's piece, making sure every movement made by the performers was meaningful and faithful to the score. A successful performance of Musik im Bauch is as much theater as it is music and Jennifer was responsible for making that part of Stockhausen's piece happen. Every percussionist was a mature artist at that point, had worked with me for a long time, and I knew I could trust them completely to master the task of realizing the piece. That said, I couldn't have imagined how deep into the work we would all go when given the kind of time Mike Svoboda had told me was characteristic of how Stockhausen himself would go about preparing one of his compositions with performers.
We first performed Musik im Bauch at Carlisle Gym on the UNM campus, in a shared performance with a percussion ensemble from the Musikhochschule in Hannover, Germany, under the direction of Andreas Boettger, who had just been appointed there in 1994, the same year I first met him, through Mike Svoboda, as he was for a long time the percussionist in Stockhausen's ensemble and was one of the performers for the Hymnen concert in Cologne. He was deeply impressed by the performance and, I believe, shared his impressions with Stockhausen and his circle upon his return to Germany.
Another German connection (there were obviously many) was the assistance provided by Paiste America. I had had such bad experiences with the percussion industry--my work was not considered commercial and, with the exception of Kori Percussion (from whom we had purchased instruments for our very successful and very popular marimba band), I was never endorsed by a percussion company, something that is pretty much the "norm" nowadays regardless of one's aesthetic interests. In fact, when I was trying back in the mid-1980s to program Julio Estrada's eolo-oolin, an amazing piece for percussion sextet that was eventually premiered at the Darmstadt summer courses in 1998, I contacted Remo because Julio's sextet needs six sets of roto-toms, with five using harnesses, like what one would use in marching bands. I thought they would be thrilled by this innovative use of an instrument they "invented" (with the inspiration of course being those amazing tuned drums Michael Colgrass made for his own music). I even spoke to Lloyd McCausland on the phone who made it absolutely clear how completely uninterested they were. So when I was told I might want to contact Paiste to see about borrowing the tuned gongs and chromatic disks, (by Andreas perhaps), I was skeptical to say the least. Imagine my surprise when I contacted Paiste and they immediately agreed to send us the gongs, including modular stands, and the three complete sets of tuned disks (also with stands) needed to perform the piece. They shipped them to us immediately and picked them up right after our concert in Phoenix. No charge. I was truly impressed with their generosity. And the instruments sounded (and looked) fabulous.
The second performance took place in Santa Fe, for the ongoing and then newly created concert series "The Drum is the Voice of the Trees," thanks to co-creator (and former UNM Percussion Ensemble member) Jeff Sussman. By then, the performers were totally engrossed in the work, in a way I don't think I've ever experienced before, due to both the intensity it took to prepare as well as the intensity it takes to perform. We were all caught up in it and audiences responded in turn. Seeing the ensemble perform Musik im Bauch, a totally uncompromising and challenging work, was for any and all who attended our concerts, and regardless of musical background or interests, an electrifying experience.
"By the time we got to Phoenix" ... we were ready. The rental truck was packed, Dan Davis and I the designated drivers, a tradition that went back to the first time the UNM Percussion Ensemble played at PASIC (1985): a showcase concert that included a new piece Imaginary Dance by our Composer-in-Residence William Wood (he was the one who drove with me that time), Marginal Sounds by Ernst Krenek, Equali VI by Daniel Kessner (who surprised us all by showing up for the concert), and the featured work, Lou Harrison's magnificent Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, performed by the equally magnificent (and recently departed) violinist Leonard Felberg, one of the most amazing musicians I've ever met and from whom I learned so much, musically and otherwise (mostly on the golf course), in the times we spent together. I don't remember who drove with me when we went to San Antonio in 1988 (I played Child of Tree there too), but I wish it had been Dan Davis so that the four-channel tape playback on the DeLio piece wouldn't have been ruined by an incompetent sound person. Oh well, I digress ...
The ensemble flew to Phoenix for the performance, well rested and ready to go, we had an excellent tech rehearsal with our own sound person Dan Davis, and the only thing unexpected was that there was someone in the performance space hired to make a video of the performance, a first for us at one of these conferences. That person was Dave Olive. Dave presided over what was at that time a state of the art audio and video recording. I'm not expert enough to tell you the details but let's just say that it was far beyond anything we had been able to record on our own, which was essentially a single camera using VHS tapes. The performance went amazingly well, the audience was overwhelmingly positive, and Dave was not only really into what we were doing but did everything possible to make as high quality a recording as possible. We were all looking forward to the results.
And then, nothing.
The Percussive Arts Society let go of the company that Dave Olive was working for, and the tapes remained in Dave's possession. At this point, there's no need to go through all of what happened since 1995. Let's just say that Dave and I have been in sporadic contact ever since, trying to find some way to get those tapes edited so that our performance at PASIC could be seen and heard. Finally, thanks to Dave Olive and his painstaking efforts, it is now possible to watch on YouTube and see for yourself what one hundred plus hours of rehearsal looks and sounds like when working on Stockhausen's Musik im Bauch. It took twenty four years but, in the end, I'm just grateful those hours of hard work can now be seen.
The percussionist Jean-Charles François, then a Professor of Music at the University of California San Diego, complimented us on an amazing performance, while at the same time finding it completely unacceptable (reprehensible even) that a composer like Stockhausen would demand such total control, dictating every single sound and gesture, by subjecting the performers, almost enslaving them, to the requirements of the piece. I myself remain ambivalent about the piece, just like I am about other kinds of difficult art experiences where I'm not sure the goal in any case is to be entertained although I know, and have experienced it first-hand, that many are entertained by a performance of Musik im Bauch. One thing I will say though, as I watched this superb recording by Dave Olive, carefully restored and edited from the master tapes, which as you can imagine needed a lot of work in the twenty-four years between when it was recorded and now, regardless of how I feel about the piece, I am completely blown away by the performance. These students gave it their all, from the beginning of the process, through every single minute of those one hundred plus hours of rehearsal, and watching them reminds me of the dedication of all my students over the years. A dedication to the idea that a definitive performance is always possible if you put in enough effort, and from 1980 until 1996, when I directed my final concerts with the UNM Percussion Ensemble, that was not only the goal, the ideal to reach, but the reality of what happened at every concert. Played to packed houses, twice a year, always the last Monday of November and the last Monday of April, so that audiences would know without even looking at the Keller Hall calendar when to attend. It was a shared experience with our audience, who never knew what to expect programmatically, but always knew what to expect musically: definitive performances of both the classics of the repertoire and the cutting edge of what was being written at that given time. And many of those latter works are now the classics of today.
There's a story that legendary band conductor Harry Begian used to tell his conducting students in a graduate seminar that he permitted me to attend. I had never studied conducting before and I will always be appreciative of him allowing me to take part. It goes something like this: "Musical talent being a given, I've seen conductors who are easy going and nice that have great bands, and I've seen conductors who are easy going and nice that have lousy bands. But I've never seen a conductor who was an S.O.B. on the podium who didn't have a great band." Harry Begian was very strict and demanding on (and off) the podium and I followed his example when I came to the University of New Mexico. My former students can attest to that and there's no doubt that I overdid it at times, just as Harry Begian did when I played in his equally legendary Symphonic Band during the one academic year (1979-80) I spent at the University of Illinois. All former students of his have stories, and I'm guessing all former students of mine do too. I've had to apologize to some for those excesses and if I haven't done so to others for wrongs I committed during my years of teaching at UNM, let me take this opportunity to do so now. My intentions were always good, and I rarely got angry without a pedagogical purpose, but even so there were other ways to have and sustain a great percussion ensemble and, fortunately, by the time I was working with this group of percussion students, my last at UNM, I had learned for the most part to motivate by more positive means, even though I'm sure if you asked them the threat of my "going off" was probably always there in the background with the hopes that it would never happen to them. I'm especially sorry that I wasn't able to finish teaching each and every one of them as I would have liked had it been possible for me to do.
This performance of Musik im Bauch (click on the link at the beginning to see for yourself) is a rare document of our live performances, there aren't that many, and a chance to see what could be accomplished by the UNM Percussion Ensemble during my tenure as Director of Percussion Studies at the University of New Mexico. I'm very proud of our work together from 1980 until 1996 and I hope all of my former percussion students treasure and take pride in the many great performances we gave back then as much as I do. To all of you I offer my sincerest thanks for your hard work and dedication--I'm deeply grateful!
