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BY JAMES McQUILLEN |
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Third Angle New Music Ensemble "The American Fabric: Charles Ives and the Birth of an American Music" Reed College, Kaul Auditorium 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., 226-0973 8 pm Saturday, Nov. 21 $14.50, $9 students and seniors Also on the Ives program are The Unanswered Question, the String Quartet No. 2, the Violin Sonata No. 4 and From the Steeples and the Mountains. While the end of the century has techies scrambling to cope with the Y2K problem ahead, the rest of us are bound to greet it looking backward, the way we do around New Year's--only in this case over a much longer stretch of time. In the performing arts especially, retrospective-making is getting a head start, as the current season is the last full one before the next millennium. With that in mind, the Third Angle New Music Ensemble has embarked on an ambitious concert series of American music of the 20th century, with a focus on the various elements that went into creating a distinctively American sound. It begins this weekend with an evening of works by the turn-of-the-century New England composer Charles Ives. Nativism in music may hardly seem like an issue to the modern listener; it's hard to find national boundaries in American music that sounds like gamelans or computers. But for much of the period defined in geopolitical terms as the American century, composers developed musical vocabularies and forms that have come to be heard as unique to this country. George Gershwin and Aaron Copland are obvious examples, and there are legions more, from Ives to Leonard Bernstein. For the season's five concerts, Third Angle conductor and artistic director Jeffrey Peyton chose pieces centered around dominant themes: freedom and community, dissent, the significance of the land, mechanization and alienation. The result is a set of intriguing programs, which is what audiences have come to expect from Third Angle. They include a semi-staged version of Copland's The Tender Land, his only full-length opera. (The ensemble recently recorded a chamber version of the work with Murry Sidlin.) "Howl! American Voices of Defiance" features Lee Hyla's piece based on the poem by Allen Ginsberg, Michael Daugherty's Sing, Sing: J. Edgar Hoover and George Crumb's scorching Black Angels, a work for amplified string quartet best known through Kronos' landmark recording. Pieces by Samuel Barber and the undersung Amy Beach appear on a program of American Romanticism, which has the added virtue of including no music of David Diamond. The season closes with a reprise of the wildly popular Junkyard Concerts, held at the Bullseye Glass Foundry in Southeast Portland. On a vast array of found instruments (scrap metal, that is, from garbage cans to brake drums), the ensemble will play works of Varese, Lou Harrison and John Cage (The City Wears a Slouch Hat, a radio play never before performed outside of New York City). Though the series covers a lot of ground, it's not comprehensive, nor is it meant to be. Even if Peyton could have had the 10 or 12 programs he would have liked in order to do his concept justice, many names would have been left out. As it is, there's no Virgil Thomson, no Milton Babbitt and no Morton Gould. There's no Elliott Carter--good news for fellow composer Ned Rorem, who famously proclaimed that no one ever really liked Carter's super-complex compositions. Many listeners will be just as happy that there's no Ned Rorem, either. Other names among the also-rans include Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Lukas Foss, Duke Ellington and Charles Wuorinen, and there are scores of other composers (sorry) who fit into the American fabric. "The American Fabric" is the title of this weekend's season opener, an all-Ives concert illustrating the initial stirring of an American sound. It's a fitting introduction to the series: Ives wrote with a quick wit and a style that blurred the lines between folk and high culture, and he prefigured much of what later composers would do. He built complex works on folk motifs (a source to which Copland would also turn), but in a fiercely idiosyncratic way that gleefully demolishes conventional notions of tonality and rhythmic structure (in ways not unlike Varese and Cage). He freely quoted Beethoven and then turned him on his head, much as the music of Mozart and Wagner would later get reductio ad absurdam treatment in the old Warner Bros. cartoons. Ives' Third Symphony--The Camp Meeting, which is receiving its Oregon première with this concert--is typical; it's constructed of the hymns Ives heard at revival meetings assembled in a way that expresses barely controlled hubbub and high spirits. For Ives, this meant democracy. (This work languished in obscurity for decades, but Lou Harrison's 1946 performance brought it to the ears of the public, and Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for it the following year. He said disdainfully of the award, "Prizes are for boys.") Democratic ideals were of paramount importance to Ives, who tempered his traditionalism with unswerving radical beliefs that he thought would lead the world into the future. In this, too, Ives is a fitting introduction to a body of music that would over decades move beyond national boundaries: He expounded in essays the idea of a People's World Nation, or, as he also called it, "the United States of the World."
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