NEW MUSIC AT THE GREEN MILL
The concert was well attended. I was lucky enough to find a seat at one of the booths, but found myself standing occasionally to see over people. For the $2 cover one could put up with much worse.
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The concert began with two works by John Austin. The first, Five Pieces for Oboe and Piano, was written in 1971, the oldest work on the program by far. Austin accompanied oboist Patricia Morehead. The second, perhaps newest work on the program was Aubade Heard on the Banks of the Maumee River (10-2-93) for solo piano. Austin informed us before he played the work that it was written as an occasional piece for a friend’s wedding and that his friend fortuitously had the initials D and A. He added that the date of the affair, October 2, 1993, could be understood as a series of intervals (tenth, second, ninth, and third) and that the Maumee River had inspired a certain intervallic leitmotif.
When Arnold Schoenberg hoisted the anchor of tonality early in this century and we were set adrift, many composers looked to the mathematical rigor of serialism. After World War II the scientific approach to writing music was accorded enough respectability that universities began to give PhDs to such composers. Ernest Krenek wrote, “What looks ahead subordinates itself to number.” This intellectualization of music was as different as possible from the attitude of, for example, Maurice Ravel, who wrote that the intellect must always be the servant of the heart. To a true modernist of the late 20th century, such as DePaul’s George Flynn, there’s no difference between the impulses of the head and heart.
Fragmentations, by Jean-Paul Bottemanne, was dark, pointillistic, and affectedly cerebral. The program notes described it as exploring “the durational opposites of the relatively free aleatoric movements and fully notated segments.” This sort of gobbledygook is designed to obfuscate. Why is any old aleatoric (chance) movement necessarily a “durational opposite” (I assume that means it lasts either longer or shorter) of a fully notated segment?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Kathy Richland.
