October 2, 1987 - New Music America Philadelphia, day 1/10
Relâche, John Dulik, John Cage, James Fulkerson, Stephen Montague, Odaline de la Martinez, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Odeon Pope and his Saxophone Choir
New Music America '87 officially opened on Friday, October 2nd with a gala reception at the Philadelphia Maritime Museum followed by an opening-night concert in the Museum's Theatre. Music for Marcel Duchamp for prepared piano by John Cage, played by Relâche pianist John Dulik, was a perfect opening night work honoring two seminal figures of the 20th century art in the city where many of Duchamp's works reside.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns several of his major works and the Relâche Ensemble has performed many of John Cage's music as part of exhibitions presented by the museum that related to Duchamp, his friends and collaborators. Next on the program: four works comprising a project titled The Expatriates curated by composer-pianist and expatriate Stephen Montague featuring American composers then living in England. The concert concluded with a rousing set by the Philadelphia-based jazz saxophonist and composer Odean Pope and his Saxophone Choir.
- Joseph Franklin, Settling Scores
♪
OPENING CONCERT Port of History Auditorium
John Dulik - John Cage: Music for Marcel Duchamp
Written in 1947 this piece for prepared piano was first performed in the Duchamp sequence of the Hans Richter film Dreams Money Can Buy. This work has a simple preparation: seven pieces of weather-stripping, one of rubber and a small bolt. Notated in the alto clef, the rhythmic structure is 11 x 11 (extended): 2,1,1,3,1,2,1. The performance depends on the sustaining of resonances with the pedal. (Program notes)
♪
...for an opening, there were no big gestures, grand curtain-raisings and vast fanfares. It started with John Cage for prepared piano. That's a part of America filed under "insouciance." Pianist John Dulik began this 10-day extravaganza with short patterns played on the keyboard.
It was Cage's ‘Music for Marcel Duchamp’, and it suggested a scene with each of those artists putting the other on while smiling broadly. Dulik also found in Cage the humor and the economical musicality that lives after the last note. After that came artifacts...
- Daniel Webster, “New Music America Festival Opens on the Waterfront”, Philadelphia Inquirer
♪
The festival's opening concert Friday was at the Port of History Museum Theater, an eccentrically shaped modern space that is one of the two main concert sites. It was successfully ''tuned'' by a California outfit called the Good Sound Foundation, which specializes in the deployment of lots of loudspeakers around a hall to bring out its acoustical potential.
The program consisted of two bows to local tradition flanking a mini-program. The concert began with John Cage's Music for Marcel Duchamp, simultaneously honoring Mr. Cage in his 75th birthday year and Duchamp, a spiritual father of the experimental-music movement whose principal repository of works is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Scored for prepared piano, six minutes long, and used originally in a 1947 Hans Richter film about Duchamp, it made a pleasingly diffident impression in John Dulik's performance (like the other classical musicians on this program, he is a Relâche member).
… After the Cage was supposed to come a grouping of four pieces by American composers resident in England, organized by one of them, Stephen Montague. There turned out to be only three, since a computer-based effort by Rolf Gehlhaar was dropped at the last moment as too difficult to master in the (considerable) rehearsal time alotted.
- John Rockwell, New York Times, “In Philadelphia, A Festival of Americana”, October 4, 1987
Actual performance recording: https://archive.org/details/NMA_1987_10_02_c1/C01-01_Music_for_Marcel_Duchamp_John_Cage.wav
=========================
A Concert of Music by Expatriate American Composers
Directed by Stephen Montague, performed by Relâche
Before World War II many European composers like Bartok and Schoenberg emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazi regime and the hostile environment of their governments. Since then, however, there has been a stredy trickle of American compsoers leaving ‘The Land of Opportunity’ for a life on the other side of the Atlantic where most post-war governments subsidize the arts to an extent unimaginable to most Americans.
This program is a microcosm of the shifting opportunities composers have sensed in finding a fertile environment in which to work.
The works of Fulkerson, Gelhaar (canceled), Montague and Martinez are the products of composers who have synthesized their individual backgrounds with their adopted countries and cultures. - SM
======================
James Fulkerson Sonata (Version B, 1982)
When I received the commission for this work, I was interested to look at formal models and formal processes. The sonata form has been one model of understanding the world which has been discredited because it is postulated upon a simplification of material which can now only be seen as a special case — one in which the amount of material has to be too severely limited.
Nevertheless, I was interested to examine this process of transformation using two different musics as opposites to the same central music or “first theme”. Using a completely differing music for Version B has resulted in quite different transformational path in each of the two versions. Neither version A nor B is preferable, each forms part of a commentary upon the other while remaining complete within themselves. - JF
♪
The Fulkerson, despite his own clumsy and pretentious program notes, often deftly contrasted aggressive Minimalist textures for instrumental quintet with softer, more tunefully reiterative sections.
- John Rockwell, New York Times, “In Philadelphia, A Festival of Americana”, October 4, 1987
Actual performance recording:
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1987_10_02_c1/C01-04_Sonata_Version_B_James_Fulkerson.wav
============================
Stephen Montague Paramell VI
Paramell VI is a chamber version of the two piano work, Paramell V written at the MacDowell Colony for Artists, Peterborough, New Hampshire, in April 1981. In this version the solo piano is accompanied by three instruments whose function is to only ‘color’ the piano’s sound rather than interact in the traditional way.
Stylistically the work stems from the American ‘minimalist’ tradition of Riley, Reich and Glass, but goes its separate way. The extensive use of repetitive phrases and patterns exhibits a clear overall shape of growth, climax and denouement which has something of a 19th century quality about it.
‘Paramell’ is an invented word used for a series of instrumental works begun in 1976. Paramell Vi was commissioned by Option Band (Oxford, England) with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain, but first performed by Relâche at the ASUC 19th Annual Festival Conference in Ohio State University, 1984. - SM
♪
The piece grew out of a work he created for two pianos and Steve had a very successful piano duo for many years, and Paramell VI came out of it.
He had an idea. He’d like to hear a group like Relâche, after we met, he said, how about if I orchestrate this “for you” and he did. So that the piano part maintains its – its strength and every- all the other colors are meant to fit around it, like the spark that all of his music has.
The heart of it is the trill tremolo, ah, mystique. I think you intuitively expect the tremolo or the ah, the trill to resolve, you don’t think of it as, ah, the basic foundation of a tune, you think of it as a, a frill, like some, some sort of ah, decoration. That’s not what’s happening. Also, when I hear it, I hear it as a, a murmuration of birds, the height of the flight changes. There are these birds swooping and that’s ah, synesthetically what I hear.
Steve titled the piece Paramell, parallel and melody. I agree, it’s hard to hear – I hear in that texture, Steve Montague’s piece kicks it off, almost like jumping on a motorcycle and just rev it up and will take you on a sonic trip.
- Joseph Franklin, The Relâche Chronicles
♪
Montague's Paramell VI sent piano, flute, cello and clarinet pulsing through patterns with great intensity in search of the final peaceful, softly sustained note. Fulkerson's ‘Sonata (Version B),’ added violin to that grouping, drawing more timbral variety from music that pulsed and surged, found a simple song tune and then plunged toward its roaring close.
- Daniel Webster, “New Music America Festival Opens on the Waterfront”, Philadelphia Inquirer
♪
…the Montague was the most popularly appealing - a piano ''colored'' by flute, clarinet and cello and creating a kind of accessibly Minimal wash of sound.
- John Rockwell, New York Times, “In Philadelphia, A Festival of Americana”, October 4, 1987
Actual performance recording:
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1987_10_02_c1/C01-02_Paramell_VI_Stephen_Montague.wav
============
Odaline de la Martinez Canciones
This is a song cycle of four songs based on poems by Federico Garcia Lorca also titled Canciones which translates quite simply as Songs. These poems, written in the 1920s show a strong folk influence.
Backwater
Night is coming.
The rays of the moon are knocking
Night is coming.
A large tree wraps itself
With words of songs.
Night is coming.
If you come to see me
through paths of air.
Night is coming.
You would find me crying
Under the large elm trees.
==============================
Song of the Rider
Cordoba.
Distant and alone
Black filly, large moon
and olives in my saddle bag
Even though I know the roads
I will never reach Cordoba.
Through the plain, through the wind
black, filly, red moon.
Death stares at me
from the towers of Cordoba
Ay! What a long road
Ay! my brave filly
That death awaits me
before I reach Cordoba.
It’s True
It is such toll
to love you like I love you!
Because of my love for you,
it hurts me to breathe,
my heart hurts, and my hat.
Who would buy me this little
belt and this little bit of
linen to make me handkerchiefs?
It is such toll
to love you like I love you!
Farewell
If I die
leave my balcony open
The boy eats oranges.
(I can see him from my balcony)
The reaper harvests the wheat.
(I hear him from my balcony)
If I die
leave my balcony open!
♪
The Cuban-born Ms. de la Martinez lent the Garcia Lorca poems a nicely energetic, atmospheric accompaniment with only piano and percussion; Barbara Noska sang the vocal part in her usual highly theatrical manner.
- John Rockwell, New York Times, “In Philadelphia, A Festival of Americana”, October 4, 1987
Actual performance recording:
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1987_10_02_c1/C01-03_Canciones_Odaline_de_la_Martinez.wav
========================
Odeon Pope and the Saxophone Choir The Saxophone Shop
Odean Pope, tenor sax; Bob Howell, tenor sax; Bootsie Barnes, tenor sax; Arthur Daniels, tenor sax; Joe Sudler, tenor sax; Sam Reed, alto sax; Julian Pressley, alto sax; Robert Landham, alto sax; Dave Gibson, drums; Eddie Green, piano; Gerald Veasley, bass
The Saxophone Shop includes six sections: 1. The Saxophone Shop; 2. Heavenly; 3. Cis, 4. Price La Sha; 5. Doug’s Prelude, 6. Elixir
Art was compressed into the first half to make room for Odeon Pope's incompressible Saxophone Choir in the second half.
Pope's half-dozen sax players, with piano, drums and bass, constitute a high-energy, smart-thinking ensemble that, working within Pope's arrangements, created bright dialogue, broad humor and some welcome explosions...
The [next] piece programmed was titled The Saxophone Shop, six sections of music expandable to fit any-length program. Pope fronts the group, sometimes plays tenor and seems to supply the push to send the music flying...”
- Daniel Webster, “New Music America Festival Opens on the Waterfront”, Philadelphia Inquirer
♪
After the intermission, the Philadelphia tenor saxophonist Odean Pope, best known for his association with Max Roach, led his Saxophone Choir in 90 minutes of selections from and elaborations on his latest album, ''The Saxophone Shop.''
Jazz and improvisational music in general have been increasingly welcomed by the New Music America circle, although it's usually more overtly arty than Mr. Pope's work. Still, his big band of eight alto and tenor saxophones and a rhythm section of piano, electric bass and drums blended massed choruses, a democratic round of solos and hard-bop energy to often skillful effect - especially during his own virtuosic yet artfully expressive solos. Particularly striking was a passage of eerie, squealing harmonics played without interruption using the circular-breathing technique.
- John Rockwell, New York Times, “In Philadelphia, A Festival of Americana”, October 4, 1987
Actual performance recording (part 1 - flows into the complete work)
https://archive.org/details/NMA_1987_10_02_c1/C01-05_The_Saxophone_Shop_Part_1_Odean_Pope.wav
I transcribed this episode of The Relâche Chronicles podcast in a previous substack, linked here:
Joseph Franklin’s book about his career in music is available here: