Groundbreaking Originals

PROGRAM NOTES | © Ty Bouque 2024

As any construction worker will tell you, the force it takes to break ground is far greater than what’s needed to mine the richness underneath it. Initial impact on a surface takes no small amount of violence, and beginnings always signify the death of something else. But no two surfaces are alike, and so the tools used to rupture them can’t ever be the same. This morning, while certainly a concert of three firsts, is divided by independent ideals of how novelty and inauguration are achieved. Haydn pushes through history; Beethoven crosses against it; and Kyle Rivera mobilizes logic and art far afield of chamber music, only to smash the two together with a force strong enough to crack new possibilities in how we think about organization and perception. The means of breaking ground are what’s on trial here today: no two composers go about it the same way.

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Haydn’s Opus 20 is often accredited with singlehandedly drafting the formula
for the modern string quartet (he’s not called the “father of the string quartet” for nothing). The intellectual atmosphere of the time—Rousseau was advocating humanistic freedom while Goethe was mining new subjectivity—was an overwhelming departure from the submission to historical or religious ideals in favor of a search for secular, expressive independence. The Opus 20 is this departure for music. Though Haydn deploys the standard format of a four-movement quartet— sonata-allegro, adagio, minuet and trio, and a fugue—the degree of free play he finds inside those strictures sets the tenor of experimentation and discovery for the string quartet for the next 200 years. In the enclosed architecture of a prescribed musical model, Haydn gives free reign to play and desire rather than sticking dutifully to structural demands. That is the new idea.

Take the first movement: while it functionally obeys the sectional divisions of classical sonata form, Haydn has upended a single parameter: the secondary theme is not, as the form requires, in the key of the major dominant, but in the minor instead. It is a tiny alteration, but in such a rigid system, even the smallest deviation can spiral out and unleash whole sequences of transformation that upend the thing from the inside. In Haydn’s case, what this little switch allows is a harmonic fluidity verging on anarchic. The second theme is so distant and unstable in the context of the established key that it sets in motion rates of material change that, in any other sonata, would be reserved for the development section. The repeat to Theme A comes as a whiplash: are we still only here after all that madness? Haydn’s great advent in the Opus 20 is thus intellectual play on the part of the composer at the limits of what form can hold. The call for change is, very literally, coming from inside a meticulously constructed house.

Contemporary music has a different attitude to form and material. It has been a long time since the expectation that every composer employ inherited organizational models was relinquished, and today, the common practice is that composers find forms and processes that uniquely suit their musical sensibilities. Kyle Rivera, for instance, doesn’t even begin with musical structures. As a child with a proclivity for art, his creativity first manifested in images; to this day, he carries a book of graphite etchings at his side. Rivera’s process starts with drawings that only later will transform into an ordering of sound. That visual imagination is crucial to understanding his music. Today’s work belongs to an ongoing collection of pieces scrutinizing cultural notions of the demonic as receptacles for the attributes which humanity most distrusts (like the nearly-human Malebranche in Dante’s Inferno 28 embodying the fear of possible physical dominance by the collective over a corrupt government).

The word grimoire means a book of spells or dark invocations. Laplace’s Demon, however, is not actually a mythological demon at all, but a vision of scientific determinism. Pierre-Simon Laplace, the 18th-century French mathematician, developed a theory which was based upon the deductions of basic physics. He reasoned that if we know information like mass and velocity for some thrown object (such as a football), we can determine the exact point of its arrival—then, were it possible for a single being to know all positions and motions for all beings in an instant, it would have complete knowledge of the future. This imaginary being, Laplace wagered, proved determinism: that such a knowledge can be imagined confirms the absence of free will or chance in the world.

It is called a demon only because the idea of its existence was terrifying to 18th century humanism. But Rivera’s work—as always, visually oriented—takes the synonymous leap and imagines what corporeal form such a “demon” might take. By beginning far outside of music’s scope—in physics, philosophy, and mathematics— Rivera can coax new and overwhelming combinations of sound and gesture from these old-fashioned instruments. The music we’ll hear today mediates a physical body for the theory, allowing us, briefly, to imagine the behaviors, shapes, sounds, and orders of a monster that leaves nothing up to chance.

And finally, continuing our ongoing study of the Beethoven cello sonatas, is the first, the original model. There is so much new about this work, up to and including the very idea of what the sonata form is meant to be. Sonatas with instruments at the end of the 18th century were still understood primarily as piano showpieces: the additional participating instrument was usually relegated to continuo. Beethoven’s great advent in the Opus 5 is to subvert the expectations of role and virtuosity, crafting an environment in which two perfectly-matched equals divide the labor fairly.

The implications of such a revolution make themselves known from the very first note. The long, unison introduction, this spinning of a complex web out of thin air, is like nothing sonata history—much less cello history—has seen until now. Out the gate Beethoven disrupts his listener’s conditioning of form and relation. He wants to raze the ordered history behind him; he knows he can’t start off in familiar territory. And so the musical journey, already at the peripheries of what is possible for the time, moves to the meaty center only by carving a fresh and untrodden route. When the first theme finally arrives, we the listeners have long since relinquished our expectations: the “sonata form” is going to mean something different here, that much is clear.

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What we understand as “newness” changes over time and according to the medium. But what is always the case is that it is inseparable from a prioritization of the instincts of the self over exterior governance. Ground is only truly broken when an artist, having rigorously mastered all the rules and regulations of the past, throws the unknowable object of their individuality into the mix and discovers what shatters on impact. © Ty Bouque 2024