You Talking to Me?

What we talk about when we make music.

Fausto Romitelli

Saturday night, heading into the DiMenna Center for the opening concert of this year's TIME:SPANS festival, I had an idea prepared. The program was Ensemble Signal and conductor Brad Lubman playing Fausto Romitelli's Professor Bad Trip, Lesson 1-3 and Steve Reich's Radio Rewrite; two compositions with important influences from progressive rock that further the cyclical feedback loop of classical/new music → prog-rock → new music, and so on. As Reich's own notes to the piece point out, "Over the years composers have used pre-existing music... as material for new pieces of their own." And prog-rock exists because of the influence of composers on rock musicians.

But once Signal got into Romitelli’s fantastic music, my mind turned to something I had heard the night before, the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center with conductor Jonathan Heyward premiering Hannah Kendall's He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing (more on that concert in the next installment of this newsletter). I was thinking how that experience left me feeling nothing, while Professor Bad Trip was hitting me in the gut, like it always has. And I realized this came down to language.

To get back to prog-rock; yes, it has a vaster popular appeal then classical music in general and new music in particular. But neither Romitelli nor Reich pandered to that. The latter listened to Radiohead after meeting Johnny Greenwood, and references (subtly) the songs “Everything in its Right Place” and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” in his piece, but it's absolutely Reichian minimalism. Meanwhile, The former's fundamental value is worth quoting at some length:

I think popular music has changed our perception of sound and has established new forms of communication. Composers of 'art music,’ the ‘last defenders of the art,' have for long refused all approaches to ‘commercial’ music. Formalism and the preconceptions of the avant-garde concerning … purity … have neutralized … sound. Today, the necessity for musicians of my generation to reject unfounded abstraction and to look for new perceptual efficacy has convinced some of us to take advantage of the inventiveness … of popular music. The unlimited energy, the violent and visionary impact, and the stubborn quest for new sounds to open the ‘doors of perception’: these aspects of progressive rock music seem to match with the expressive concerns of certain contemporary composers.

Romitelli died in 2004 age 41, from cancer, and just before the indie-classical music that would try to bridge compositional traditions and formalism with what its composers thought was intelligent pop of the first decade this century. What Romitelli did, especially in Professor Bad Trip, was different. He actually dismissed the “tonal or modal clichés” of rock, and that’s key to his music which has the intensity and grip of a great rock band with nothing in the way of conventional ideas about harmony, melody, structure, or form. Scored for a chamber ensemble that includes piano and percussion, and electric guitar and bass, the piece is indeed heavily abstract—it may seem chaotic—but it is founded on the idea of hitting the perceptions and mind, altering the sense of time and sonic color in ways inspired by Romitelli’s reading Henri Michaux’s on hallucinogenic experiences. It’s less prog than psychedelic, and with a vengeance. (There’s a score follower here)

Ensemble Signal playing at the TIME:SPANS festival. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

Signal’s playing was as sharp as can be, the musicians playing with precisions and also a commanding sense of what the music was about, every attack and articulation seeking an impact. There is a long cello solo in the second part, and Lauren Radnofsky shredded it, slicing down through the lines with a real edge. They created the transformative atmosphere we seek at concerts where one loses awareness of being in a hall and is just overwhelmed by the music, hanging on every event.

On the surface, Kendall’s piece is roughly similar, a series of crunching, gnarled sonic events without a familiar form. But the experience was the opposite, a hollow feeling of observing actions from a distance, uninvolved. Her piece is quieter and less dense than Professor Bad Trip, it seemed to seek an atmosphere that is probably impossible in the bright new transparency in David Geffen Hall, but that also seems beyond its means. Because while Romitelli wants to screw around with your mind, Kendall wants to tell a story related to Schumann (his Symphony No. 2 was on the program) and mental health. He is intimate while she is lecturing.

And the lecture was so full of avant-garde clichés and gestures scattered with no apparent purpose, a demonstration that the composer knows the post-WWII history of composition. If the music was meant to explore ideas of mental health, the clichés were even worse, complexity and ambiguity reduced to simplistic signifiers. There was also no rhythmic quality, which hurt—even though there are no clear rhythms in Professor Bad Trip there is tremendous pulse and attacks that imply meter.

Come si dice?

What Romitelli called “unfounded abstraction” and “efficacy” I would boil down to language, and place the divide between the academies and the streets. Kendall’s language was about her knowledge of the language of modern music, in the same way that contemporary musicology is mostly about theory and barely about the music. Romitelli’s language is not just the energy of rock but personal, his “quest,” not answers but questions, full of more psychological complexity because it starts from the gut and goes there—it is the sound when spoken language cannot articulate what needs to be said, and it still gets said. There’s no way to say what music means but it can still be clear and sincere that it is trying to mean, and say, something.

That’s also why I always say there’s no such thing as difficult music. Romitelli, Cecil Taylor, they may produce events that are dense and seem chaotic, but they always have an immediate purpose and a desire to communicate. Composers have spent decades disavowing Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?”, but the academies train them to write for other composers and the musicians who play new music, and very little for all the other people out there. Romitelli had skills and craft, and by seeking that “visionary impact” he would have been a consequential figure, if only he had lived longer.

That is a long way of saying that festivals like TIME:SPANS are at their best when they play new music that’s not meant for a specialists (even as that’s the de facto audience there), and there is a lot of such music scheduled. The Saturday concert was full of life and energy, extremely well played. Radio Rewrite is vintage Reich, no real surprises to it but made with superior skill, and the playing was far more vivid and exciting than I’ve heard, with a punchy sense of swing from pianists David Friend and Oliver Hagen, and percussionists Carson Moody and Matt Evans. A terrific evening that would have pleased just about anyone—with more to come over the next two weeks—there just has to be a way to get people not just out of the academies but off the streets into concerts like this.

See the TIME:SPANS schedule and buy tickets here.