From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #140 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Wednesday, June 21 2000 Volume 02 : Number 140 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: m/scelsi ["David S. Bratman" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 23:42:25 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: m/scelsi Don - I've been holding on to your comments about Scelsi for some time, figuring that I shouldn't rely on 15-year-old memories of hearing the 4th Quartet once. So I finally got around to listening to it at the Stanford music library. I also had the score, which I was unable to follow - a rare experience for me. You wrote: > The Scelsi 4th Quartet has a very simple structure: start quiet, > maintain the single drone (composed of a bundle of microtonal > "strands") which gradually rises in volume and pitch to a > reverberating climax, then subsides. Call it "=Bolero= for bees." > Works for me, heaven knows. This seems to me to be misleading, partly because I've misled you as to what I meant by large-scale structure, but partly for other reasons. First, your description makes the work out to be an arch structure. It isn't (and neither is "Bolero", which is all crescendo and no decrescendo): the climax of the 4th Quartet is near the end, with a short subsidence that functions, to my ears, as a coda. But this is a minor point. More important: secondly, while "Bolero"'s structure _is_ that simple - gradual rise in volume, no development or other thematic manipulation apart from tone color - the 4th Quartet's isn't. It's much more complex than that, and is no more a simple up-and-down than a drive over the Appalachian Mountains is a simple up-and-down. Whether it works or doesn't work, "Bolero for bees" it certainly is not. I bet Scelsi could have written "Bolero for bees" if he wanted to (on evidence of the 5th Quartet, of which more below), but he didn't. Of course, most masterpieces with coherent large-scale structures - in fact, almost all of them that aren't in some way minimalist - have by-ways and asides and eddies in the current like this. So what's my problem with this aspect of the 4th Quartet? This is where I need to expound on what I mean by structure. Having a large-scale structure by itself isn't enough. For the work to have "the profound logic" (to use Sibelius's phrase), the large-scale structure must manifest itself in smaller levels. The place of the individual sections and even phrases in that larger scale must be manifest. And this is what I don't hear in this work. If a work trending in one direction (say, getting louder) reverses direction for a bit (i.e., in this case, gets softer), the episode's place in the whole should make intuitive sense. At least it should for the kind of architecturally stable music I've been praising, and criticizing this work for not being. This is what I don't hear: the various effects sound incoherent, unpremeditated, almost random. At no point do I feel I understand _why_ what's happening follows what preceded it. This may be intentional, but if so then Scelsi is writing to a different aesthetic. The other problem, and what really bothers me, is the absolutely uniform level of extreme painfulness in the sound. I don't mind dissonance, really, even extreme dissonance at times, but it has to be modulated. This is completely unceasing, and unlike the volume level it doesn't vary. It's one thing to like spicy food, but being served a plate with a pile of cayenne pepper and nothing else on it is something else again. Part of the genius of Tolkien is LOTR's regular alternation between scenes of danger and of partial, temporary cessation of danger. Old Man Willow / Bombadil, Barrow-wight / Bree, Weathertop / Rivendell, Moria / Lorien, and so on. Take only the danger scenes and write a whole volume's worth, and what do you get? Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books. Bad move. But even complete dissonance can work, in the right kind of work. And here's where Scelsi's 5th Quartet, which I also listened to, comes in. On one simplistic level, this is nothing but a succession of minor seconds, _all on the same pitch_. It's certainly not something I'd want to hear often. Yet it holds together, it has coherence in structure in a way that I can follow, and the steady alternation of chords and silence provides a soothing regularity that pleasingly sets off the dissonance, like a dollop of sour cream over the pile of cayenne pepper, as well as the silences themselves offering direct contrast with the otherwise complete dissonance. It was also, with its slow, semi-minimalist aesthetic, a lot more like Konx-Om-Pax - which, though it certainly has its dissonant aspects, is less consistently so than either quartet. ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #140 *****************************