The composer of a piece premiered by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Saturday night hadn't been born when minimalism was an audacious new music that inspired me to want to compose. [See my page The Minimalist Zone.] Curiosity about the new new music drew me to Woodruff Arts Center for the first time since the pandemic.
Jerry Hou conducted with joy and shared evident rapport with his players. During bows, he ran among them to draw attention to soloists and sections.
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| Hou, center; from top left: Tower, Montgomery, Bartok, Pratt |
This was the premiere for Rounds, a piece for piano and strings by young composer Jamie Montgomery. Her program note alerted us that the form was a rondo, and that the first movement was a rondo within a rondo -- hence the title, a translation of "Rondos." But we also heard material played by the pianist echoed by the strings in the manner of what in English we call a round.
Piano soloist Awadagin Pratt and I are 20 years older than when I saw him play a recital at Georgia Tech. Back then he was a young lion with a thick mane of dredlocks. While he played, he snarled "Don't do that!" at a reporter snapping his picture and glared at the house when people applauded at inappropriate moments. He was a big guy who sat on a teeny little bench and raised his hands above his chest to reach the keyboard. Aside from the theatrics, he also made clear the middle voices of a Bach piece -- a revelation for me, and a miracle of technique, I thought.
He has mellowed. Saturday, he was professorial, with thinned hair, a gray beard, and smiles. The bench was only marginally lower than we're used to seeing. But he was sensitive as ever playing a cascade of notes tenderly one moment, beating block chords another.
The concert opened with 1920/2019 by eminent composer Joan Tower, commemorating women's right to vote and the #MeToo movement.
The new music, different as the pieces were, shared a few characteristics.
There was a great variety of textures and colors, from full ensemble sound to just a soloist or a duet, sections playing in tandem or going up against each other. Pratt startled us when he stood up to reach inside the piano to pluck and strum the strings.
Then, the composers played more with modules or gestures than with anything we could call a melody. Ascending scales in Tower's piece (not quite do-re-mi -- a couple of tones were augmented) weren't a tune but a suggestion of upward movement -- and a ceiling to break through. Montgomery gave the piano a spray of delicately arpeggiated notes (think "Rustles of Spring"), a lovely and quiet gesture that she slid up and down the keyboard and contrasted with harsh explosive chords.
Taking a long view, I think that the minimalists I loved had some influence on what I heard Saturday. Before them, the concert composer's pride was in their ingenuity developing and varying themes. Even 12-tone music was rigorously focused on what you do with a given sequence of notes. But the minimalists thinned out melody to just a module of two or three notes repeated over a pulse, drawing our attention instead to the processes of imitative counterpoint, gradually shifting harmony, and instrumental colors.
In Tower's piece, I heard the wood block's tok-tok-tok that John Adams patented in his big hit "Short Ride on a Fast Machine" ca. 1986; the repetition of a single bass note was a feature throughout the movements of her piece, sometimes slow and regular, sometimes fast, whether puffed, plucked, or pounded. Whatever the composers might say about minimalism, they would surely agree that their pieces are not about melody.
After their pieces, I picked up some of the same qualities in Bartok. In the five movements of his concerto, I recognize several gestures that make a strong impression every time we hear them. They're repeated, imitated, varied a little, but none is a tune you could hum for more than a couple of bars -- except the annoying one by Shostakovitch (or maybe Lehar) that Bartok ends with a fart from the low brass. The colors and the contrasts take me by surprise even now, more than 40 years after I first fell in love with it through an LP.
It was a joyous welcome back. The hall was nearly full, with an audience diverse in age, ethnicity, and dress. I saw a lot of young couples. All appeared to be enthusiastic. Keep the tradition alive, people, and keep the new music coming.
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