Festival in Residence: Ann Arbor
Friday, June 20; 7:30PM
Ty Bouque
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Tonight I want to dwell upon a decorative element of architecture, ornamental and so not strictly necessary (what art is?) and yet foundational to how we might hear this program. Among sculpture’s oldest techniques is relief, the raising of an image from the raw matter of material by whittling away at its negative space. The Parthenon Frieze is no doubt the most famous of these, but they’re everywhere in ancient architecture (our Vitruvius, who has followed these notes like a Virgil, would have known them intimately). And though the word itself—from the Latin relevere, “to raise up”—suggests that ascendency is the most important quality, I want to propose the opposite. The three works tonight each encode relief in their forms: to hear it, we must for the etymologic counterpoise: what is raised by relief, whether memory or life or song, only ever comes from an equal and opposite sinking down.
Ethan Soledad’s Poems from Angel Island take as their source carvings left by prisoners in the walls of the eponymous San Francisco detention center. One of the primary entry points for Asian immigrants between 1910 and 1940, Angel Island played host to a troubled site of governance: the battle over immigrant rights under the Chinese Exclusion Act meant subjecting American hopefuls to months of interrogative detention in the lonely wooden structures. The texts still carved into the walls, many of them in Mandarin, were left behind by anonymous prisoners, testimony of an indomitable presence the government was working very hard to erase or deport. The result is both an artistic object and a cultural memory, the beautiful texts forever freighted with the history of immigrant abuse and violent border control. Soledad has raised these inscriptions from their sunken wooden refuge to our audibility tonight, and no doubt there is relief—both sculptural and generational—in breathing music into so painful a memory. But the reading I want to offer is that their raised audibility and newly heightened attention involves an opening up beneath: hearing the music of these poems, we also hear down into the contextual soil, listening to the voices of history as much as to notes and rhythms. Relief opens into the depths.
Brahms, too, was after something like relief in the years of those final opuses. The viola sonatas are altered transcriptions of their older clarinet siblings, first written for Richard Mühlfeld after the august Brahms’s return from self-imposed retirement. Writing for the end of life, this is music in preparation for that last raise of the chest in final breath, the body arched as soul flies upwards. But—the strange counterpoise again—that ascendency is never a sonic one. In the second movement of the Viola Sonata in F minor—like the Mozart we’ll soon hear, one of the most dramatic harmonic inventions of his career (though not as much performing its audaciousness)—spiritual ascendency is achieved by an impossibly long harmonic descent. Keys are sinking lower at every turn: in the B section, falling stepwise to an impossible relation, A major in the key of A flat, creating that unearthly sense of float that only Brahms could pull off. And when at last the primary theme returns, it is in much too high a key, only to slip twice down, landing—with relief—at home.
(I have always searched and failed to find the words to name that particular quality of “fast” music from the end of Brahms’s life. It is different from the vigorous urgency of lust or fury that the symphonies or the fugues in Deutsches Requiem espouse. He stops racing, and one can hear—and this, the part for which words do not adequately account—something much slower and patient underneath all the notes, a sense of nowhere to be but here pervading even the quickest of tempos. I have never been able to find the word for that; although relief, come to think of it, isn’t a bad one.)
And finally: Mozart’s Quartet No. 16 in E-flat major is a fascinating little object, pristine and brittle and impossibly meticulous. The centerpiece in a series of quartets he dedicated
to Joseph Haydn (the set that famously prompted the older composer to claim the younger as “the greatest composer known to me, either personally or by reputation”) taking up the instrumentation most associated with elder Austrian. But from the first, all evidence points to a Mozart at the limits of his imagination: the musical material for this quartet is among the most sinuous and chromatic in his output. (And there is no better tribute to the man who revolutionized the string quartet than to take it even further.) Where often—as I said a few nights ago—melodies are just building blocks for Mozart’s structural inventions, here we see him really at his craft in making something idiosyncratic and unpredictable.
Which is where relief comes in. With time and a kaleidoscope of shadows—new harmonizations and re-orchestrations—what first appeared as an impossibly disjunct utterance comes to feel like, well, melody. Mozart builds a process of acclimation whereby an awkward surprise grows comfortable enough to serve as home turf. It becomes almost hummable, though on first presentation—in unison all on its lonesome—it was ungainly and erratic. What is raised, in other words—what is brought into relief by Mozart’s dexterous sense of play—is our own hearing. We hear ourselves hear Mozart, noticing how our fluency with formerly foreign things grows with time. We ourselves are cast into relief by Mozart (and this is what his operas do as well, offering us a mirror of startling visibility). He shows us our attention, our comforts and discomforts, and our ability to learn and cohabitate with what once felt like distant strangers, even to love and grow attached where once we felt unsafe. What a relief.