UCSB’s persistently fascinating Ensemble for Contemporary Music, under the brilliant direction of Jeremy Haladyna, will offer its final concert of the 2014-15 academic year (season) at 4 p.m. this Wednesday, May 27, in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall (UCSB Music Building).
The program — gathered, for several reasons, under the banner “Persistent Visions” — consists of Scott William Perry’s “The Persistence of Memory” for String Sextet and Piano (world premiere); Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night for String Sextet, Opus 4 (1899); the Scherzo for Flute and Piano (1957) by Jean-Michel Damase; selections from Pentagrams, Book II & III by Dane Rudhyar; Robert DiDomenica’s Quartet for Flute, Violin, Horn, and Piano; and Patrick Kavanagh’s The Debussy Variations: No. 11, for Solo Horn.
The Perry and the Schoenberg will be performed by the ECM Sextet (Matisse Geenty and Johann Velasquez on violins, Carson Rick and Anna Heflin on violas, and Kathryn Carlson and Ian Davis on cellos), with pianist Robert Johnson clocking the Perry. Playing the flute in the Damase and the DiDomenica will be Azeem Ward.
“I’m sure you heard about the ‘mime phenom’ Azeem Ward,” Haladyna wrote to me, “catapulted to fame by a couple of British universities and lots of crazy British kids.” Alas, Haladyna was paying me a UCSB compliment. I’m a tourist from another country when it comes to “new media” and from another planet when “social networks” are involved. Clearly, however, Ward plays the flute very well, and both compositions will benefit from his performance.
Violinist Camden Boyle, hornist Jarrett Webb and pianist Haladyna will join Ward for the DiDomenica. Webb plays the Kavanaugh all by himself. Pianist Rosa LoGiudice will play the selections by Dane Rudhyar. Haladyna will conduct the septet playing the Perry.
The name “Persistent Visions” derives from the title of Perry’s work, “The Persistence of Memory,” which is also the title of Salvador Dali’s famous painting, alternatively called — sometimes, by the painter himself — “Soft Watches.” When Scott took the name of Dali’s work, he also took its images as a kind of program, and created, as Jeremy says of it, “a good audio equivalent to Dali’s picture.” Beyond these few clues, it is pointless to speculate.
Most of the works on this program reference a vision of reality that is heightened or mutable far beyond our everyday experience of it. In one form or another, this vision of hyper-reality, and the compulsion to recreate it in a particular medium, is the basis of all creative action. The film director Michael Powell (Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)) put it this way: “After I had worked in film for a while, I understood that there was no such thing as realism — there was only surrealism. This insight liberated me.”
Rudhyar and Kavanaugh have devoted a great deal of their intellectual energies to studying and writing about the occult — as believers, not debunkers. (A recent ECM concert featured the work of composer Cyril Scott, who also sought to travel on secret paths.) Schoenberg had occult leanings, too — he was devoted to numerology — but this was little more than an advanced form of the superstition that afflicts all great artists (and all great atheletes): they can’t really account for their superiority, and they are afraid that it will suddenly vanish as inexplicably as it came. Artists who are sidetracked into the occult underworld invariably find themselves becalmed in obscurity, whatever their merits as artists.
“We all want to live forever,” President Bill Clinton said, “and that’s a good thing.” But Doctor Faustus is fiction, not history. The best way for a composer to live forever is to write great music, not to make a contract with the Devil or sail off into the astroplane. Even Faustus had planty of warning to this effect. In Marlowe’s play, Mephistopheles visits Faustus in his study, and Faustus quizzes him about his existence. Mephistopheles tells the prospective client that he, Mephistopheles, is damned and in hell, like all the devils. “How comes it then,” asks Faustus, “that thou art out of hell?” “Why, this is hell,” comes the demon’s reply, “nor am I out of it.” (O Mensch! Gib acht!)
Rudhyar (1895-1985) was born in Paris, and given the name “Daniel Chennevière” by his parents. He graduated from the Sorbonne when he was sixteen, and went to study at the Paris Conservatory. Arriving in the United States when he was nineteen, and made his home here for the rest of his life. His spiritual journey is interesting from an autobiographical point of view, but irrelevant (I think) to his music, which is quite powerful and attractive in small doses (such as the pieces selected by Ms. LoGiudice). If we know of him in a hundred years time, it will be on account of his music.
At the invitation of the director, Gunther Schuller, Robert DiDomenica (1927-2013) joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in 1969 and remained there until 1992. In addition to his admirable work in accademia, and his splendid achievements as a composer, DiDomenica was a virtuoso flautist, and was much in demand as a sideman in classical, jazz, and Broadway performances or recordings. He was, in his own work, a serialist whose gentle work seldom sounds 12-tone.
Tickets to “Persistent Visions” are $10 for general admission and $5 for students (except UCSB students, who will be admitted free), and they are available at the door, by phone at 805.893.2064 or online by clicking here.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.