December 11, 1908: Elliott Carter // Heiner Goebbels and Heiner Müller - The Man in the Elevator NMANYC 1989
Includes a video of one of the Kitchen performances
Elliott Carter - Manhattan 1908
At the 1984 festival in Hartford, Ursula Oppens presented one of the featured virtuoso solo afternoon sessions and her session included Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies, described in the official program with Carter’s own notes about the work.
Night Fantasies is a piano piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night.
The quiet, nocturnal evocation with which it begins and returns occasionally, is suddenly broken by a flighty series of short phrases that emerge and disappear.
This episode is followed by many others of contrasting characters and lengths that sometimes break in abruptly and, at other times, develop smoothly out of what has gone before.
The work culminates in a loud, obsessive, periodic repetition of an emphatic chord that, as it dies away, brings the work to its conclusion.
In this score, I wanted to capture the fanciful, changeable quality of our inner life at a time when it is ot dominated by strong, directive intentions or desires - to capture the poetic moodiness that, in an earlier romantic context, I enjoy in works of Robert Schumann like Kreisleriana, Carnaval, and Davidsbundlertanze.
- Elliott Carter
That presentation, dedicated to the memory of American pianist Paul Jacobs (who had passed away in September 1983) and to the English composer Cornelius Cardew, also included her playing Alvin Curran's For Cornelius, Anthony Davis's Middle Passage, Charles Wuorinen's Blue Bamboula and Frederic Rzewski's Winnesboro Cotton Mill Blues.
Reviews of that performance:
Elliott Carter's 1980 Night Fantasies, presented by pianist Ursula Oppens on one of the festival's few solo recitals, stood out as the week's most finely wrought offering simply because its creator is one of the few living American composers who deserve to be called geniuses.
- James Wierzbicki, St. Louis Globe-Democrat July 14 A comeback for the musical avant-garde?
Ursula Oppens added both a touch of class and - even on a toothless piano - real musical chops; she offered Elliott Carter (Night Fantasies) and Charles Wuorinen (a winningly bratty item called The Blue Bamboula) with cheerful defiance not of the audience but of the academic pall people like me say those names ought to cast.
- Geoffrey Stokes, Village Voice July 24 - "New Music Back to Normal"
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As noted earlier this week, Elliott Carter’s Remembrance was performed as part of the Miami 1988 gala opening. Carter's notes that the work was "in memory of a great patron and believer in Music of Our Time - Paul Fromm. Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation for Tanglewood Music Center in memory of Paul Fromm, 1988."
This was Carter’s bio in the official program:
Reviews of this performance by the New World Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas as conductor:
Elliott Carter's 1988 Remembrance for Paul Fromm, which begins with the dirge-like thud of a drum fading into bright, high, sustained strings; alternating piccolos, piano, delicate percussion, rueful horns and winds, and trombone plaint produce an eerie, glistening gravity.
- James Roos, Musical America, "New Music America Festival" May 1989
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Elliott Carter’s Remembrance, a eulogy composed this year in memory of arts patron Paul Fromm, is reminiscent, quite fittingly, of Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. Instead of a trumpet asking about the nature of human existence, Carter has a plaintive trombone periodically sighing a phrase that never seems resolved. And, as in the Ives piece, the strings are mainly concerned with soft, subtly changing chords that suggest the imperturbability of time.
It is a haunting work, far more accessible than much of Carter’s writing, though just as doggedly atonal, and it was delivered with remarkable sensitivity.
- unsigned (online at least), South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "New Music America An Engaging Experience", December 5, 1988
It would be the only two times that Carter had been performed at the NMAs, though it should be noted that during the francophone radio broadcasts on the SRC national network in Canada for NMA 1990, Daniel Caux (an Euro critic who had been given space in the official program as well) complained in that French way of audibly waving his hands in the air, “But where is the Elliott Carter? Where is the Elliott Carter in this festival?”
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Heiner Goebbels and Heiner Müller
The Man in the Elevator
November 11-13, 1989, the Kitchen, NYC
Fall of the Berlin Wall: November 9, 1989
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Berlin_Wall
The performance at NMA 1989 in NYC of Heiner Gobbels and Heiner Müller’s The Man in the Elevator had such a long program text that I decided to present it in this supplementary post. I do believe this is the longest program description of a single work at NMA, with the exception of the American Theatre Company’s presentation of Harry Partch’s Revelation in the Courthouse Park, shown in tandem during the 1989 festival as well. It certainly is the longest NMA text without a paragraph break.
David Garland presents excerpts from the work on his WNYC program, Spinning on Air during the festival week:
November 11, 1989: NPR report on the fall of the Berlin Wall, recorded off my hotel room radio
I had originally thought this was a one time thing, as I also thought that the night we went to the performance was the night the Berlin Wall came down, but hindsight indicates it happened two days before the first of the three performances. It’s also possible that this celebration-noise was the encore for all three showings, as seen in the full length video.
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a 2016 post featuring an excerpt and I presume this is Peter Hein:
As part of a series of mini-documentaries created to celebrate the ECM label’s 50th anniversary, they presented this which includes an excerpt from the version made in NYC in 1988 with Don Cherry, Tim Berne, George Lewis, Ned Rothenberg and others…
Thanks to the Wendy Hour, we have a full version of one of the three performances at NMA89:
Official program book bio:
ECM profile of the work on a blog:
https://ecmreviews.com/2012/01/16/der-mann-im-fahrstuhl/
Heiner Goebbels’ website with more details, photos and links to 17 reviews in German and to the one in the NY Times.
https://www.heinergoebbels.com/works/der-mann-im-fahrstuhl/76
Some tracks from the ECM recording:
The aforementioned NY Times article by Stephen Holden, November 13, 1989
“Dealing with the Sudden Shock of Freedom”
''I'm dizzy from the events in Berlin,'' the East German playwright Heiner Muller announced in prefacing the American premiere of The Man in the Elevator, his music theater collaboration with the composer Heiner Goebbels that was presented as part of the New Music America Festival.
As it happens, the work, which had the first of three performances at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, on Saturday (the final performance is tonight at 8 o'clock) reflects the spirit of events in Eastern Europe, for it is very much concerned with the erasure of boundaries and the concept of freedom. Conceived for an experimental ensemble, the score juxtaposes jazz, bossa nova, electronic sound effects and harshly melodramatic action music with a text that is read both in German and in English.
Mr. Muller's surreal story (actually a monologue taken from his play The Mission) describes in microscopic detail the reflections of a man taking an elevator on the way to a meeting with his dreaded boss. In his state of excruciating self-consciousness and paranoia, time almost seems to stand still as he imagines all kinds of scenarios. Then suddenly he is catapulted to freedom. From a hyperanxious urban environment, he finds himself in a poor Peruvian village where he feels completely alien but liberated.
The ensemble gathered at the Kitchen to perform the score included Mr. Goebbels on keyboards, Arto Lindsay (narrator, singer, guitarist), Charles Hayward (drums and percussion), Ditmar Diesner (alto saxophone), Fred Frith (guitar, bass), Johannes Bauer (trombone) and Ernst Stotzner (reader). The 45-minute score is divided into short sections that offer abrupt but bracing changes of style and pace, from brawling big band jazz to delicate South American folk to one and two instrument improvisations, to percussive noise.
Mr. Lindsay took both the tenderest and toughest solos, as he swung between smooth bossa nova singing and an insistently abrasive scratching on the guitar. Mr. Bauer's trombone explored registers not ordinarily associated the instrument in passages of high creamy trills, while Mr. Hayward's drums mapped out a rhythmic territory as geographically and stylistically broad as Mr. Goebbels's electronics, which suggested everything from traffic jams to cricket-infested woodlands. Mr. Muller sat center stage throughout, impassively smoking a cigar.
Except for one scene in which four of the musicians impersonated deskbound bureaucrats, the staging was minimal, with the bilingual readings and brash contrasts of the score depicting the magic carpet world of The Man in the Elevator.