By Rodney Punt
The undertow
of somberness in the last two Ojai Music Festivals was banished for the latest version of the venerable yet ever-renewing series on June 6 to 9. Credit for
breaking the spell goes to exuberant dance maven Mark Morris. The famed American
choreographer is the first of his profession to be hired as the festival’s
Music Director, an annual rotation previously extended only to musicians.
Although bursting at the seams with 37 events -- Libbey Bowl and off-site concerts, in-town movies, distant seminars and closer pre-concert talks and much more -- the thematic focus remained sharp. Building on a festival trend in recent years, the fullness would make it nearly impossible for any single patron to attend
all events in the non-stop schedule that revved up each day at dawn’s early
light and wound down in the night’s wee hours.
Go West Young Man
Highlighting a ravishing four days in the bucolic valley
north of Los Angeles were instrumental works, many set to dances, and songs
from West Coast iconoclast composers of the last century. Often neglected by
European and East Coast musical establishments, their works received a better
welcome from the American dance scene. Those of Lou Harrison and his teacher Henry Cowell became staples of the Martha
Graham and Mark Morris companies, while those of John Cage were most frequently
associated with that of his life partner, Merce Cunningham.
Over the long
weekend, the Mark Morris Dance Group interpreted many in their terpsichorean
debut on Libbey Bowl’s limited but welcoming stage. In two Friday evening
performances, the dances were a delightful novelty to an audience more accustomed
to the workings of musicians rooted in place.
Go East Young Man
The festival had a distinctive Pacific Rim stamp. Most
of the featured composers were either born or raised in California; Graham
studied there; and both Mark Morris and Merce Cunningham were native to the
state of Washington. Added to the mix was experimental pioneer Charles Ives and
the California trained, Alaskan-based environmental composer, John Luther
Adams.
All but Ives were nurtured in a Western landscape free from the yoke of
European and North Atlantic conventions, yet also free to embrace the imported
sights and sounds of Asia. The ensuing East-West fusions continue to propel the American
art music scene toward new horizons.
Gamelan Sari
Raras performed six Indonesian pieces and seven in the genre by Lou
Harrison on Friday and Saturday,
highlighting influences of that sonic palate in the
works of West Coast composers. The general impression of this music was of hypnotic yet complex melodic and rhythmic variations using “off-key”
pentatonic scales, actually tuned to natural harmonics.
Some find it even better tempered than well-tempered music making.
Two Icons Dividing a Century
The long
overdue Ojai premiere of Terry Riley’s In
C created a sensation Saturday morning. Written in 1964 by the native
Californian, the work is widely credited with launching the Minimalist style. Its
inclusion here revealed a huge debt to the aforementioned trance inducing,
bell-like gamelan music in Java and Bali. Riley’s prescription for open-ended
techniques in the work’s performance was exploited fully by a large battery of
musicians and soprano Yulia Van Doren. The transfiguring rendition they
achieved proved to be the festival’s unanticipated high-water mark.
Not so
effective was the Thursday’s opening night concert. The self-described “avant-garde
populist” jazz ensemble The Bad Plus (Reid Anderson, bass; Ethan Iverson,
piano; David King, drums) essayed their arrangement of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Many versions of the
work have aired as the centennial of its rambunctious 1913 premiere has approached.
The two-piano and the one-piano four-hand ones, heard locally, have stressed
rhythm and structure over orchestral color. At Ojai, The Bad Plus found no such sonic
niche. Individual riffs from the bass and piano had their moments but the
drum-set smothered the work’s overall punch and precision.
Dances with Lou Harrison and Friends
Friday
evening’s two dance sets began with early 20th century Americana: Mosaic and United, based on Henry Cowell’s
second and third string quartets, and Empire
Garden on Ives’ Trio for Violin,
Cello and Piano. The Ives gazes back to a simpler America but its astringent
harmonies suggest no return. Cowell’s quartets recall the populist (and contemporaneous) murals of
Thomas Hart Benton with traditional melodies and dance forms. His limp-legged
waltz in 5/4 meter nods knowingly to that of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony. The
American Quartet performed in the first two; Pianist Colin Fowler and members
of the MMDG Music Ensemble essayed the Ives.
The MMDG dancers worked in united, mimicked gestures and pastel colors for the Cowell
pieces, while emphasizing more varied primary colors and individualistic
movements that built human structures and oppositional gestures for the Ives.
Some of the MMDG’s double-jointed maneuvers were inspired by Southeast Asia. In
each work, the Morris style emphasized body extremities, with extended arms,
shaking hands and horizontal and vertical body plunges commanding attention and
hewing close to the implied contouring and phrasing of the music itself.
After a
break the second set for a large ensemble Grand
Duo on Lou Harrison’s Grand Duo for
Violin and Piano, was a musical study of thesis and antithesis, worked out more
melodically than harmonically and using Asian scales and tone clusters. Its
polka had the feel of a circle-forming Western two-step, fully exploited by
Morris to convey the awkward grace of country folk. Sassy amorous encounters
and abstract explorations of human contortions flowed intuitively and
irresistibly. Samuel Barber’s vibrant, elegant Excursions for the piano was played with close steps and
pirouettes. Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez exquisitely dispatched the West
Coast premiere of Jenn and Spencer,
an intense, intimate pas de deux based on Henry Cowell’s Suite for Violin and Piano. In both sets, the vividly colored
costumes alone were worth the price of admission.
Iconoclasts Unite!
In this
festival of sensual delights, John Cage was something of the odd man out with
his conceptual works and legacy of intellectual explanations. He was also the last
man out in two late-night and sparsely attended concerts that might not have
been given their full due in performance. Friday’s Four Walls for piano and soprano, a collaboration with Merce
Cunningham for his dance company, explores a dysfunctional family unit, its music
“evoked by a severely limited range of material… subject to obsessive
repetition, slow change, and heightened contrasts” in the words of Chris
Hailey’s fine program notes. It felt duly claustrophobic in the version from
Yulia Van Doren and pianist Ethan Iverson. The next night’s set of six short
pieces performed by Red Fish Blue Fish came off better, if only because they
exhibited more contrast in textures.
A revelatory recital of Cowell and Ives songs on Sunday morning featured the three
singers of the weekend -- soprano Yulia Van Doren, mezzo-soprano Jamie Van
Eyck, and bass-baritone Douglas Williams -- with the versatile pianist Colin
Fowler, of unflappable flair all festival long. Ives’ songs, ranging from
nostalgic to cheeky, are fairly well known, but Cowell’s are not and they
should be, especially those he set to poems of his parents. The juxtaposition
of the two mutually supportive composers was apt. The concert also aired Ives’ String Quartet No. 2 with the American
String Quartet. Mark Morris came on stage to present an unscheduled encore, Ten Suggestions, danced by
Dallas
McMurray to Tcherepnin’s piano Bagatelles played by Fowler. As finale, Morris led the audience in
Carl Ruggles’ last work, Exaltation, a wordless hymn in memory of his wife, here set to the Emily
Dickinson poem, “I died for Beauty.”
Libbey Bowl's stage offered more: Harrison’s relatively popular Suite for Symphonic Strings, proving his chops in a more academic
idiom; the American String Quartet in Béla Bartók’s sixth string quartet and
selections of Bach’s Art of the Fugue,
well executed if less related to the thrust of the festival. Pieces by Ives,
Cowell, Vincent Persichetti, and William Bolcom led the way to Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra
by Red Fish Blue Fish. The last concert had a full complement of musicians with
more Harrison and Cowell, including the latter’s virtually unknown ballet, Atlantis, sounding like hot and steamy movie music from the early sound era and featuring the moans and
groans and sighs and cries of the festival’s three singers, perhaps not quite
up to their erotic potential.
Off-Site Performances
Events in
locales away from Libbey Bowl have each year become a larger aspect of the Ojai
Music Festival. Between the dance sets on Friday night, a concert of three tiny
suites for children by Erik Satie and two works by John Cage, including the
notorious 4’33”, marked the debut of
the toy piano in the Festival’s line-up. The event was held near the jungle gym
at the Libbey Park Playground. While children gallivanted about,
oblivious of the concert proceedings and making joyful noise, adults stood reverently and scrutinized the tiny piano. The large frame and
serious visage of pianist Yegor Shevtsov hovered over it and tinkled away at the inadequately
amplified instrument. Truth be told, it was hard to focus on the content of music at so high a
register or to take very seriously whatever message its tinny sounds may have offered.
The Alaska-based composer John Luther Adams writes what he calls
“eco-centric” music. He favors phrases like “sonic geology with sonic geometry”
and has stated “I hope to move beyond self-expression and the limits of my own
imagination, to a deeper awareness of the sound itself.” Last year his
Inuksuit received its West Coast premiere in
Libbey Park. This year three of his works upped the ante in ambition,
two of them with widely placed musical paraphernalia on dramatic hilltops overlooking
the Ojai Valley.
With all the world his musical stage, Adams would seem to be the Christo of Music. On the basis of the three works presented here, however, the
question of musical substance matching an ambitious vision remained open.
Saturday’s
Strange and Sacred Noise, staged on Two Tree Knoll has nine movements
alternating between snare or bass drum rolls, marimba riffs and siren wails; they started and stopped sequentially but didn’t develop. Sunday morning on Ojai’s
Buddhist-inspired Meditation Mount, Adams’
songbirdsongs
was a pleasant if simple greeting to the morning, with piccolo birdsongs, more
marimbas, and percussion filigree. As a musical composition, its aviary battery
confirmed that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
In both works, the Red Fish Blue Fish ensemble provided
meticulous readings. In both, the composer, dressed as The Man With No Name, was a spectator who placed himself in a trance-like kneeling position in full view of the
audience, either behind or in front of whichever component of the music was at the moment performing.
“Eco-centric” was not quite the term that occurred to
this observer.
Back
at the Libbey Bowl on Saturday night, Adams’ ambitious large orchestra tribute, for Lou Harrison, consisted of continuous “rising arpeggios over sustained harmonic clouds” that lasted for an hour. The arpeggio's first iteration sounded like the final bars of a Hollywood cinemascope
soaper. Its gooey orchestration was repeated over and over again, at each iteration the rising stairway stopping before entering another thought. Well before that hour passed it sounded like an escalator to nowhere.
Was some kind of minimalist statement the intention? Perhaps, but the repeated phrases did not produce the discernible variations that can transform minimalism's better pieces, as in Terry Riley’s earlier In C. The Luther Adams piece remained in the same stupefying moment at every iteration, as if
caught in the similar tape-loop that trapped Ground Hog Day's Bill Murray in a perpetual present tense.
The presence of John Luther Adams at this festival was, at least in the planning, a logical
extension of the survey of West Coast musical iconoclasts from California to Alaska's frontier wilderness. But the quest for a sonic master of scenic music will have to wait another day.
Let’s Go to the Movies
Lou Harrison was the subject of director Eva Soltes’s
loving film portrait, Lou
Harrison: A World of Music, captured in the composer’s own words and those
of his friends and professional colleagues. Insightful and deeply touching, it traces the life of the Oregon
native from a childhood in San Francisco to his death ten years ago. Tireless
in composing, constructing instruments (shown on film), promoting and producing
concerts, even rescuing modern works, it was Harrison who stitched together the
jumble of fervid sketches that became Charles Ives’ Third Symphony. That task and more caused his nervous breakdown. Painful years
of confinement and a glacially slow recovery followed, but the composer
recounts them with frankness and a lack of regret. Coming to an accommodation
toward the end, the gentle, curious, ever-inventive Harrison built a straw bale
house with his partner Bill Colvig. The home in the California desert city of
Joshua Tree is today a shrine to his followers.
Salomé, a 1920’s Hollywood version of the Oscar
Wilde play, had a campy avant-garde staginess and reportedly an all-gay cast.
Its flop at the box office ruined the career of lesbian star and prime mover,
Alla Nazimova. The Ojai airing gave The Bad Plus opportunity to vamp a
desultory jazz accompaniment not as interesting as the film itself. Call it
reverse Regietheater: generic jazz
riffs imposed on original stage intentions. (As alternative, check out the
Charlie Barber score on YouTube.)
Falling Down
Stairs chronicled
one of the many artistic collaborations of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, this one with Mark
Morris, who set Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3
a-dancing.
The Morris Boys
With the ebullient Music Director Mark Morris front and center this
year, Artistic Director Tom Morris kept mostly out of the limelight, which was just
the way the quiet mover and shaker wanted it. (Dubbed in jest the “Morris
boys” the two directors are not related.) Tom Morris’s decade of visionary leadership has taken the long view. It's brought a festival once known exclusively for egg-head music into a place where it can, with a mix of styles, intelligently reinvent itself and also draw ever wider audiences.
And that’s just how it should be at Ojai.
----oooo----
All photos but the last are by Timothy Norris and used by permission of Ojai Music Festival. The last photo, of Red Fish Blue Fish, is by Rodney Punt and used by permission of the author.
Punt can be contacted at
[email protected]
