by Michael Bratt
To those who know me well, it is no secret that I am huge fan of the late, great, iconoclastic, American composer Charles Ives. One of the many reasons for this is because he takes existing pieces and presents them in a new way for audiences. For Ives, his music became a patchwork collage of hymns, American folk tunes, ragtime jazz, and others thrown together in a helter-skelter attempt to create a new American music. For FiveOne Experimental Orchestra, it has become a way for us to show our audiences a direct connection to our musical heritage.
Unfortunately, I have found this approach polarizing.
In our second season, some of you may have come to our concert at the Sculpture Center, FiveOne Experimental Orchestra’s current base of operations. Madeline Lucas preformed a flute solo there by Toru Takemitsu accompanied by an analog moog synthesizer. Now, many people balked at the notion of accompanying this work (including Madeline’s teacher who just so happens to have played the definitive recording of this work), as it is obviously meant to be played solo – increasing the sense of isolation and desperation one experiences while listening to it. So why drop an old, outdated synthesizer into the middle of this delicate piece? It’s because it ADDED to the sense of isolation. Most people didn’t even realize there was an accompaniment until about 2/3rds of the way through it. A composer asked me while the piece was being played if there was construction going on outside. When I told him what it was, he just said there was something completely “disturbing” about it.
I understand if people have reservations with adding changes to finished works when they know not what they do. However, if someone hates changing standard works simply because “the composer would be rolling over in his grave,” then I couldn’t care less. The ideas should be beholden to the music, not the composer. Imagine if Berio never touched Mahler when he wrote Sinfonia. How would that third movement sound?
It appears that we will be doing more and more of these “cover” pieces (for lack of a better term). If anyone saw our show at the Cleveland Public Library on Saturday (and thank you for coming if you did), we did this in two different ways. First, we played solo instrumental works and reinterpreted them by adding percussion. This actually harkens back to a tradition that we started with our very first season. Back then, we played Bach instrumental interludes with drumming to fill in the gaps between pieces, creating a seamless wall of music from the first piece to the last (logistically that is a pain to coordinate, btw). Second, was the reinterpretation of Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s Tale.” I imagine this might draw more ire than the others as the work is more recent and includes a well-known libretto. Pairing this work with the “Wind and the Willows” allows us the creative freedom to not only bring it to a new audience, but to discover a modern classic in a brand new way. For me, it’s the only reason for us to play a 100 year old piece in the first place.
To make a long story just a tad longer, what if we didn’t reinterpret these pieces? What life does a work have if we are beholden to the same performance practices? Even Stravinsky himself would subtly change his own works when conducting them. Sometimes, I feel as though I’m contributing to a dead language. For me, reexamining and fiddling with classic, older works keeps things fresh and creates a dialog with the past. In other words, it keeps the music relevant.
