Frank Brickle

Cygnus and Brickle have worked together for over 20 years.  One thing we have accomplished together:  we managed to confound modernists and musical conservatives alike, confounding the die-hard modernists with ever more luscious harmonies and ever more simplicity in the melodic lines; confounding the musical conservatives because Brickle's music is still not at all conventional, and in fact there are some scary dissonances if you listen hard enough.   I don't know if there's a composer anywhere who cuts both ways like Brickle does at the moment.

Brickle celebrated the transformation that took place in "serious music" over the last 35 years.  He admired the brave taboo-breaking of composers like Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Morton Feldman,  Scott Johnson, even while recognizing that these pioneers gave up too much of what was dear to him.  Brickle is ever loyal to modernist principles, and increasingly devoted to the idea that those principles don't have to make music sound like hell.  The principles and the sound are two different things.  Brickle also embraced the idea that music can make references to vernacular and historical musics, while still being rigorous--each work founded on its unique contextual principles.  Vernacular and historical references are still taboo in some modernist circles.  I celebrate these offences against modernist propriety.

Brickle & Babbitt

Brickle has ever been a great champion and student of the work of Milton Babbitt, always keenly interested in how Babbitt's work was developing.  And good things come with their antidote. Even Babbitt himself was aware of this.  He tended to take great interest in students whose interests were furthest from his own. Brickle was not one of those, he was among the converted.  Babbitt's musical dialogue was highly infectious, in both positive and negative ways.   No one knew this better than Babbitt himself, which is why he encouraged those who marched to their own tune.

Babbitt's antidote, if one was looking for it, could be found right there at Princeton, back in the '70s when Brickle was a student there.   Ben Boretz & J.K. Randall both had a great influence upon Brickle.    Ben Boretz has told me that his Meta Variations was intended as a criticism of Babbitt's thinking at the time, a little nudge (a nudge that I'm not qualified to try to explain here).   I do appreciate another nudge--Brickle recalled a comment that Boretz made in the '70s--Boretz wished Babbitt's charts were just a bit further in the background.

This was prophetic, as  both Brickle and Babbitt over these past 20 years found this distance from their charts. Cygnus saw the dramatic transformation in Babbitt's music---Composition for Guitar; Soli e Duettini; Danci;  the Cavalier Settings---these works all move toward this distancing from the charts that Boretz was talking about.   In Babbitt's very last works his relationship to his charts becomes absolutely essential--that's to say--as far from literal as can be, concerned with essential musical relationships.  Swan Song, and especially the 6th string quartet are extraordinary works that speak with a clarity that we never hoped for in a composer who took such pride in being difficult.

Brickle's dialogue differs from Babbitt's in many ways.   J.K. Randall, another maverick at Princeton, was adamant about "not erasing" the focal harmony (in Princetonian parlance is a "focal collection" of pitches).  Brickle took this to heart, learning to be very careful in this regard.   More brazen modernists like throwing listeners as many bumps and shocks as they please;  Brickle wants to preserve the flavor of his focal collection through its prolongation.  This is to say that the focal harmony's chromatic extensions can be negotiated in a manner where that harmony's flavor is not erased through that extension. Here is the essence of Brickle's take on Princetonian techniques--Brickle never suffered from the misunderstanding that a faithful rendering of a chart is the goal of a composition.   No, the chart sets forth some principles of prolongation--some ways of hearing into a focal collection through its extensions and back into itself.  And the chart sets forth ideas about how the focal collection may evolve throughout a work.

Jonathan Dawe

I once accused Milton Babbitt of writing music that has fractal qualities.   He said, no, I am interested in small things and their relation to big things, but if you are interested in fractal music you should get to know Jonathan Dawe.

I did, and I'm still reaping the rewards.   I must also acknowledge Furious Artisan's Marc Wolf, who encouraged me to include Dawe's *Under the Tafelmusik* on my first Furious Artisans disc (Hausmusik).  That was Dawe's first recording, and it continues to help sell my disc.  Dawe fans seek it out.

Dawe has thoroughly explored how many fractal procedures can be employed in music--rotations, cellular automata, nesting.  Dawe got to know the pioneer of fractal geometry--Benoit Mandelbrot, before he died last year.  They met at Wuorinen's 70th birthday concert. Wuorinen had been giving fascinating presentations of fractal images and fractal music, in collaboration with Mandelbrot.

Dawe is a truly courageous modernist in works like Fractal Farm, a powerful and compelling work of purely abstract music. I love Dawe's work for the compelling way it evolves. For me the fractal procedures are important as *transformational* procedures.

And there is another side to Dawe's work that I no longer think of as a novelty.     Dawe has a great love for Baroque opera, and he has found that Baroque music gets even more baroque when it's fractalized.   Moreover, because he fractalizes music that is often familiar to us (Handel, Vivaldi, Montiverdi), his fractal procedures are made transparent to us.

Dawe is keenly aware of the fractal nature of Stravinksy's rotations.  Stravinsky was ever reinventing the Baroque--a precedent that gives a degree of historical depth to what Dawe does with his fractal Baroque music.   Charles Wuorinen's fractal nesting is also connected with Stravinsky.  Wuorinen's visceral rhythms remind us of Stravinsky, and there is Wuorinen's Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky (a work commissioned by Stravinsky's widow).

It was a revelation to find that Dawe's latest opera, Orlando, was a delight to sold out audiences for three consecutive nights at the Italian Academy.   The work gets from Handel to something akin to the soundworld of Ligeti & Kurtag in a few deft aural steps.

Dawe became a superstar when James Levine commissioned his to wrote for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has continued to have many important commissions and performances.  In the coming summer Dawe's music will be performed at Tanglewood.

Matthew Greenbaum

*Nameless*, soon to be released by Furious Artisans, is likely the most ambitious work of Jewish sacred music ever undertaken.  The title refers to Maimonides' *Guide to the Perplexed*, a theological work that held a key position at a time when Muslim, Jewish and Christian theology were enjoying a moment of remarkable cooperation.  Greenbaum meant this work as a response to 9-11, as an act of solidarity among all the Abrahamic traditions.   The work brings together many musical traditions that are dear to us.  The first 7 minutes of the piece culminate in a "Psalm without Words", a passage that might be thought of as a tribute to Stephan Wolpe.  Greenbaum was Wolpe's youngest protege.   The opening of the piece lays out a set of 9-notes which is decomposed in various ways, evolving and gradually deriving the Psalm.

Greenbaum was also a student of Mario Davidovsky, and I hear the opening of Nameless as a very clever cooperation between strategies that I associate with Davidovsky & Wolpe.  The agonistic, stance-formative opening gradually yields to the gratifying and self-sufficient Psalm.

The Psalm, far from extinguishing the resources of the work, is followed by a Pastorale.  While the Psalm strikes us with its joyous self-sufficiency, the Pastorale is a haunting texture and also a harmony that we hadn't heard before, another aspect of the opening material; later there emerges a furious ostinato-section….  Inexorably we get to know the various aspects of *Nameless*.

The Jewish & Muslim avoidance of representational art, the avoidance of uttering the name of the one diety--*Nameless* ties these abstractions to traditions of musical abstraction.  We should note in particular Wolpe’s connection to the Bauhaus, an artistic movement that sought authenticity, unity of form and function, and spurned gratuitous ornamentation.  *Nameless* is certainly Greenbaum’s most ambitious and,  I think, successful expressions of these values and traditions.  It is a consummate expression of New York City modernism.

Wild Rose, Lily, Dry Vanilla employs a fascinating Emerson poem, which the music performs as well as sets.   It was Greenbaum’s contribution to the Cygnus Ensemble's Emerson bicentennial concert.

Greenbaum has explained how Maimonides relates to Emerson:   Maimonides-->Spinoza-->Goethe-->Emerson.   Moreover, this lineage ties in with the Bauhaus:  Goethe-->Wordsworth-->Ruskin-->Morris-->Bauhaus

It is these connections we are seeing in early 21st Century American modernism that makes me particularly pleased to see how well Furious Artisans has reflected these traditions in its graphic image.  Jon Dawe's recording has a Pre-Raphaelite painting on its cover, as does Frank Brickle.  My first FAR disc has a Frank Lloyd Wright watercolor.    The revival of Arts & Craft design is seeing a parallel in early 21st Century music, and Furious Artisans is the only company that gets these connections.