PROGRAM NOTES

Ordo Virtutum (Order of the Virtues/The Hierarchy of Courage), the morality play by Hildegard (1098-1179), centers on the defense of a Soul by Virtues such as the deliciously medieval ‘Contempt of the World’. The competing impulses which form a protective network around a mortal life can also be its undoing, as virtue turns to vice and the Devil, who plagues the Soul and taunts the Virtues throughout the play, gains his foothold. Ordo Superman is a ritualized narrative concert which uses selections from Hildegard’s epic to frame the program, bridging the sometimes broad gaps in style among these contemporary pieces.

Since the 1970’s, Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928), one of the seminal figures in 20th century music, has been working on a seven-opera cycle called LIGHT. Entrance and Formula (1978) comes from the first completed opera, Thursday (each opera is named for a day of the week). The trumpeter enters the performance space in the first part of the piece, playing fragments of the ‘Formula’, Stockhausen’s name for the themes he uses in the opera. In the second half, having assumed his place, he performs the Formula for Thursday. As diverse as LIGHT’s musical language is, its construction is just as compact. The Formula heard here is one of three that form the bedrock of the complete cycle, and almost every musical moment can be traced from these themes.

Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) was an Italian aristocrat who, after a nervous breakdown, wrote ascetic music that tended to focus on the potential of limited sonorities, most infamously in his orchestral suite Four Pieces (for one note). His improvisations, while in a trance-like state, on the piano or Ondiola would become the basis for his compositions. The suite of pieces for trumpet, from 1956, do not possess the same imaginative command of the instrument that his string and piano writing does, but they do mark a bold step forward for the trumpet repertoire.

ANALOG member Johnny Chang’s (b. 1979) Microscores Project has been running since 2001, yielding loads of wonderful music, none of which is intended to exceed thirty seconds. Canadian expatriate Chiyoko Szlavnics’ submission calls for a single sustained glissando. Pauline Oliveros’ microscore was written on a flight to Eugene, Oregon, and asks the performers to express “joy, hope, energy, love, and awe by trembling, vibrating, flickering, fleeting, sustaining”.

Upper Lip Dance (1983) is the obbligato from Lucifer’s Dance in Saturday, the second opera from LIGHT to be completed. The piece makes full use of the instrument as it illustrates the archangel Michael’s protest against Lucifer. The trumpet bleats, hisses, whispers, and growls, using all of the Devil’s tricks against him. With the wa-wa mute, the Devil’s slippery tongue is imitated with a logorrheic flow of nonsensical syllables. In the central cadenza, the performer assumes aposture of subjugation (a favorite trick of the Devil), and at the piece’s end, the performer leaves the stage, unbowed and undefeated. Neither Michael nor Lucifer ever achieve a decisive victory in LICHT.

In 1997, the English rock band Radiohead went on tour in support of their breakthrough album OK Computer and, as documented in the film Meeting People Is Easy, the tour quickly became a ‘miserable pilgrimage,’ particularly for Thom Yorke whose pain was most directly expressed in the song “How to Disappear Completely”, which would appear on their 2000 album Kid A. Yorke explains:

“That song is about the whole period of time that OK Computer was happening…Something snapped in me. I just said, ‘That’s it. I can’t take it anymore’. And more than a year later, we were still on the road. I hadn’t had time to address things. The lyrics came from something Michael Stipe [from R.E.M.] said to me. I rang him and said, ‘I cannot cope with this’. And he said, ‘Pull the shutters down and keep saying, ‘I’m not here, this is not happening’.”

Symphony (1962) is a fluxus piece by George Brecht, which consists only of the title printed on an index card with a hole punched through its center. In 2005, Johnny Chang completed a realization of the piece which calls for performers to assemble excerpts from the symphonic scores of various female composers, including Hildegard, whose most widely known musical work is Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum . Fragments of Hildegard’s Symphonia have been assembled on a tape collage. As the audience passes the tape recorder to their neighbor, they are offering a variation on the original meaning of the word ‘symphony’, and sounding together Brecht’s piece.

Johnny Chang composed DUEOL for Joseph Drew to perform on any instrument and it is receiving its world premiere tonight. Johnny writes about his piece:

DUEOL refers to various dualities which surface when the performer interacts with the composition: Performing & Creating; Composed Sound & Intuitive Sound; Performer & Themselves; Open Score & Closed Score; Performer & Composer; Sound & Silence.

 

These situations are fused into one when the performer is presenting the piece. DUEOL is not intended to provide solutions, instead staging a public forum for discussion and debate on the matters at hand.

While scoring the video installation He Was a Poet, Istvan B’Racz (b. 1966) asked Joe Drew to provide some prepared trumpet samples for him to use in the soundtrack. As a preparation, B’Racz requested that all the slides be removed from the trumpet, and the resulting sound so captivated him that he wrote a solo piece for Drew. Four In Stance (2006) is a collection of four brief sketches that explore the mysterious sonic properties of the slideless trumpet.

“O Superman” (1981) remains one of the most unlikely hits in history. Laurie Anderson’s (b. 1947) electronic classic is a portrait of the inescapably fragmented identity of a modern female, and ANALOG’s treatment uses the minimalist gestures of the song to construct an improvisation piece à la Terry Riley. Anderson’s titular evocation of Nietzsche’s übermensch is never sublimated by a similarly powerful female construct, but rather a detente is reached, which is simultaneously barren and cozy, a true snapshot of modern gender identity, and strikingly parallel to Hildegard’s own symbology.

Anderson’s plaintive finale, “So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms. In your electronic arms,” is an electroacoustic reworking of the closing lines of the final Processional from Hildegard’s play, “Father, behold, I am showing you my wounds.” The closing juxtaposition of these two pieces brings these two female voices, separated by some 1800 years, into a harmony by proximity, the only true consonance left in the world.

And so the Devil is vanquished from the arena, but just. For all his tricks and protestations, the fabric of seemingly contradictory Virtues have kept the Soul safe from the Devil’s advances. — Rene Edmunds