Posts Tagged avant-garde
Better Know a Sequenza (part 3)
In an effort to share the music of Luciano Berio with the world, we here at the Guidonian Hand bring you part two of our fourteen-part series, Better Know a Sequenza.
In this installment: My personal favorite of the cycle, Sequenza VII for oboe, and it’s alternate for soprano saxophone. VII is special for a couple of reasons. First, it is one of the handful of “alternate” sequenzas in the collection. It was originally written for oboe, but do to the nature of oboe literature (and the nature of oboists–ZING!), it’s more frequently performed on soprano saxophone as Sequenza VIIb. Additionally, VII is one of only two sequenzas (along with X for trumpet) that has a second “part.” Berio asks for a drone to sound on any instrument (or voice) throughout the work on the pitch B.
I’ve seen the work performed a few times, and I’ve heard of the drone being produced any number of ways: a digital tuner, a pre-recorded loop of the soloist, a group of other players, and even asking the audience to hum the B. Humming the B sounds cool, but I think I’d get tired of it by the sixth or seventh minute of the piece.
YouTube offers us many complete recordings of some very impressive performances of VIIb, but only a few excerpts of VII. Saxophone friends have told me that they have heard that Berio himself grew to prefer the piece played on soprano saxophone. However, in doing research on the piece, I was not able to corroborate this. Personally, I prefer it on oboe. Here are a few Sequenza VII videos.
First, we bring you the incomparable Alex Klein, principal oboe of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. You can hear the audience humming in this one.
This next video features another excerpt from the beginning section of the work. This time, the drone is being passed around a group of oboists.
Berio’s use of the drone is one of the things that first draws the listener in at the beginning of the piece. The soloist begins with a sharp, short B, and the audience initially hears the drone as an ethereal reverberation. The next half-minute or so is controlled by the soloist playing the same B with different fingerings to get slightly different timbres and tunings, and the drone is thoughtfully provided as a reference point to compare each new sound as it is introduced. Throughout most of the piece (leading up to the climax, near the “golden section”), the range of the oboe is gradually expanding in both directions from that B. The ending of the piece features some instrumental calisthenics and some timbral heroics, thanks to some really cool multiphonics. I like the bright, piercing quality of the oboe multiphonics, but the equally harsh, fuller-sounding multiphonics on the soprano saxophone are nice, too.
In conclusion we bring you a very thoughtful and enthusiastic performance of Sequenza VIIb played by Taimur Sullivan. Also, this one is the whole work, so you get to luxuriate in Berio’s formal design.
Guido, let’s put Sequenza VII up on the Big Board! The fightin’ VIIth!
Virtuoso
I’m taking a jazz history seminar class right now called “The Avant-Garde in Jazz.” Sounds pretty cool, right? For the most part, it is. However, one thing that constantly bugs me is the reactions from some of the less adventurous ears in the class. When established mainstream players like John Coltrane and Miles Davis started playing “out,” they were generally accepted, but when new musicians like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor hit the scene when they had not already made names for themselves as mainstream players, they were rejected. People said, and some of my classmates still say, that they played crazy sounds on their instruments because they couldn’t play straight-ahead bebop.
I disagree. I think Cecil Taylor used the technique that he used because he wanted to make the sounds that he made, not the other way around. So what if Ornette Coleman couldn’t play “Giant Steps” like Coltrane? He wasn’t trying to do that. These are issues that the art world had been wrestling with for decades before this. Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian were painting representational art before they investigated abstract art, but others did not. Jackson Pollack got the same sniggers and raised the same eyebrows as Ornette. The question then arises: What does it mean to be a virtuoso? How do we measure virtuosity?
It’s not being able to play “Giant Steps” or paint a bowl of fruit better than anyone else in town. Virtuosity is having the technical facility to achieve your creative goals. Through technology, it’s becoming easier for people without advanced training to achieve their creative goals, and that is what scares traditional virtuosi so much. “Ornette didn’t pay his dues, man.” Forget the dues, he’d be playing bebop if he had paid his dues. He wants something else.
This definition of virtuosity is not without its problems. If the creative goals define virtuosity, why not set creative goals to what is readily achievable? After all the tears have been shed, the most positive result of the controversy of technique is that when virtuosity is made subjective — that is to say, considered in relation to artistic goals — the art itself becomes the primary subject of discussion. It no longer matters that Cecil Taylor can’t “play the changes,” so what do you think of his music? Virtuoso Bob Ross can paint happy trees all day, and I don’t care. Virtuoso Norman Rockwell can recreate “Leave it to Beaver” in as many permutations as he can think of, and Wynton Marsalis can relive 1940s New Orleans as long as he wants. I’m not moved. I don’t care how you say it, but please say something.
For your consideration, the music of Cecil Taylor:
