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Crossing Cultures, Erasing Borders
Present Music at the Elvehjem
Madison, WI (January, 1992)
by Arthur Durkee
Entering the Elvehjem Museum on the UW-Madison campus on the afternoon
of Sunday, January 12, 1992, I was immediately confronted with
the monumental print works by Xu Bing that are currently on display.
As I walked around the massive “Ghosts Pounding the Wall,” a 1991
stonerubbing of the Great Wall of China (taken from a side, a
tower, and a portion of the walkway of the Wall from a section
near Jinshanling), the air was filled with the sounds of musicians
warming up before a concert, and the usual subdued sounds of people
walking in the galleries. I went up the stairs past the stonerubbings,
which were hung from the central gallery’s ceiling and anchored
in a pile of dirt by the entrance, and wandered around the museum
before the concert. Xu Bing’s work is concerned with tremendous
human effort being put into “useless” work, to demonstrate the
meaninglessness and futility of human endeavour. For example,
a side gallery on the second floor of the museum contained the
1988 piece “A Book from the Sky,” consisting of woodblock prints
of Chinese characters that took three years to carve–but the characters
are meaningless, not real language or real communication. The
“Book” takes three forms, all traditional to Chinese literature:
long scrolls hung from the ceiling, suspended over the rows of
actual books laid in a square pattern on the floor, and the walls
covered with floor-to-ceiling newspaper-style broadsides. A third
room contained a series of prints that leapt into the print-making
process itself by having been printed from woodblocks in various
stages of carving. The artist describes his works as essentially
meaningless, and yet their huge scale and repetitive, dense images
gave them presence and power, perhaps even a kind of dignity that
does not need any “meaning” to support it.
All this was still turning in my mind as I sat down to hear the
Present Music concert, which was a free concert presented as part
of the Wisconsin Public Radio series “Live at the Elvehejm.” The
contrast between Xu Bing’s work and the mostly 19th Century paintings
lining the walls of the gallery in which the concert took place
left me thinking about cross-cultural contact and uses of “folk”
materials in art. These thoughts were immediately echoed in the
concert program, for most of the pieces played were by composers
working mostly outside the cultural mainstream of Euro-American
art music.
The concert began with “Bongo O” (1982) by Roberto Sierra, played
by solo percussionist Terry Smirl. Composer Sierra is from Puerto
Rico, and has been Composer-in-Residence with the Milwaukee Symphony
Orchestra since 1989. The piece was gestural, with groove-like
patterns that several times built to a climax and then changed.
The instrumentation consisted of two bongo drums only, played
with sticks and fingers; the player was also required to shout
out syllables of rhythmic vocal sounds that reminded me of Indian
drum vocable patterns. All in all, an exciting piece–I would like
to see more of this kind of percussion music written and performed.
Next on the program was Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe’s
“String Quartet No. 8” (1969), in five connected movements. Sculthorpe
has long been interested in music from Indonesia, and particularly
Bali; he has produced a number of works based on ideas borrowed
from the Balinese shadow puppet theatre and related genres of
sung and danced drama. The string quartet performed here was laden
with strong feeling and emotional expression, with delicate, sad
sections of music fading into the resonant silence of the museum
galleries, alternating with sections of rhythmic passion. The
fourth section of the piece is overtly based on kothekan, the
rhythms made by groups of Balinese village women pounding rice
husks in large wooden troughs. But Sculthorpe is no simple imitator
of a Balinese soundscape; this composition spoke of a true confluence
of the musics of East and West, and succeeded in drawing the listener
into its own created new world.
A premiere performance of a new work by Roberto Sierra was heard
next, five “Characteristic Pieces” (1992) for bass clarinet solo
and chamber orchestra. The soloist was William Helmers, one of
the core members of Present Music. Each of the short movements
was based on a characteristic musical interval, in order, the
minor second (rhythmic, aggressive), the major second (flowing,
watery), the perfect fourth (an short interlude, quirky, punchy,
and funny), the major third (slow and stately), and the minor
third (dancelike, gestural, climactic). The solo part was integrated
into the whole fabric of the music, rather than being emphasized
in the way a concerto solo part often is.
After a brief intermission (during which I wandered out to walk
through Xu Bing’s work again), the ensemble launched into Erik
Satie’s collection of short pieces “Sports et Divertissements”
(1914), originally for piano solo, and here playfully orchestrated
by Eric Segnitz and John Tanner. The pieces were performed without
conductor; Present Music’s Artistic Director, Kevin Stalheim,
instead played trumpet and helped out with percussion chores.
Due to technical difficulties, the slides of the etchings that
originally accompanied the musical pieces were not projected on
the museum walls as planned. Oh well–Satie’s commentaries on each
piece were recited before each piece was played, and this recaptured
much of the spirit that the missing slides had lost. Also, the
arrangements were well in keeping with the imaginativeness of
the originals, and included various noisemakers played by John
Tanner. Great fun!
The concert concluded with Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla’s
“Four, For Tango” (1987), for string quartet. The piece was originally
written for the Kronos Quartet, and contains many overt traces
of the composer’s cultural roots in the Argentinean tango. Even
though Piazzolla studied in Paris with renowned composition teacher
Nadia Boulanger, he played bandoneon (a small accordion) as a
child in tango bands; Boulanger encouraged him to incorporate
this into his concert music, and Piazzolla has since written a
long series of remarkable pieces that destroy all the boundaries
between “art” music and “folk” music, and the artificial boundaries
too often thrown up between cultures. The piece was well-played
by Present Music, and ranged across a gamut of passionate tango
rhythms and experimental techniques for the string quartet. The
piece got me thinking again, too, about the huge Xu Bing prints
out in the main gallery: how technique and style have no one nation,
no one language, and how inspiration and creativity seem enhanced
when artists break out of the molds to which they are too often
assigned. Both the art installation and the music, if they were
“about” anything, were about going beyond the boundaries and rules
that keep peoples apart; boundaries and rules that are, like Xu
Bing’s invented Chinese characters in “A Book from the Sky,” ultimately
meaningless.
The entire concert was a pleasant break from the usual “Sunday
Afternoon Live at the Elvehjem” fare, which has recently tended
towards the unadventurous. I encourage the Elvehjem to schedule
many more concerts such as this one: adventurous, fun, and challenging.
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