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Monday, 30 September 2002
Meeting Messiaen @ SFMOMA ::
Thursday night I saw Meeting Messaien, an audio-visual introduction to the world of Olivier Messiaen, a fascinating variety of works inspired by and derived from Messiaen’s own work.
La Joie Parfaite - a message of music told a story in a way that transcended my inability to understand French when sung by an operatic bass :-)
Australian visual artist Kurt Brereton showed portions of his interactive CD-ROM Messiaen at Mt. Kiera.
There was a 5-minute video edited by Veronique Larcher, excerpts of a documentary on Messiaen by Olivier Mille.
David Wessell described, and Mary Chun demonstrated, the Ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument featuring speakers mounted in cabinets containing a gong and piano strings to create unusual resonances (it’d be interesting to experiment with synthesis algorithms based on physical models of this sort).
Morton Subotnik performed a portion of his work Gestures, where mouse gestures control the simultaneous painting of visual and audio textures. It reminded me fondly of David Zicarelli’s OvalTune, a program with which I made a lot of music in 1987-88.
John Zorn’s Duras, for piano, organ, two violins, two percussionists and a “prompter” (conducted and played occasional sounds) was a compelling contrast—and rapprochement—between beauty and apparent chaos. Afterwards it seemed that this was a common thread in the pieces; much as bird songs sometimes initially sound random and chaotic, the longer and more closely one listens, the more sense it makes.
The evening’s moderator quoted someone (paraphrasing): “Beauty is but the bait for truth.”
What makes music good? Copland said that it had a lot to do with contrast; I especially think about the contrast between surprise and predictability. Why do I like the kind of music I do? Why is my first inclination when buying music to look for artists whose work I have already heard, and in many cases, already own? Because I know I’ll like it and I haven’t spent enough time discovering new tastes? What I found striking about Messiaen’s work and these other works inspired by it, is that the pieces seemed to refer less to anything I’d ever heard before (Copland might say “too much surprise, not enough predictability”) and yet, as I listened, consistencies in other dimensions (approach, technique, mood) emerged.
References:
The magnifying glass: Yes ( 6 October 2002)
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