Shouse Soundscapes
Wednesday June 11; 7:00 P.M.
Ty Bouque
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In our opening concert, we covered the first of Vitruvius’s three arenas of architectural design. The first, ichnography, the art of the blueprint, lends this year’s festival its thrust. Tonight we turn to the second in the series. Orthography is, at least according to De architectura, “the elevation of the front, slightly shadowed, and shewing the forms of the intended building,” which is today an outdated understanding. Virtuvius got to his definition by an imaginative etymologic pirouette: with orthos meaning correct and graphein meaning writing, he took orthography to mean the first sketch of a design in which the building is drafted in relief and with some sense of its optical reality. (Today we now call this orthographic projection.) Ground plans, after all, are hardly indicative of elevation and scale, of how the building will actually look. Nowadays, of course, orthography takes its etymology literally and refers to the conventional spelling systems of a given language (correctly/written); as a field of study, however, it retains Vitruvius’s interest in first glimpses: how a written language first comes into relief.
No matter how we read for the orthographic, whether by language or architectural projection, we turn up a curious through-line tonight. We’ll tease out both in time. But the real unifier here is not what is being played but by whom: the Shouse ensembles, young emerging musicians from around the country, take turns showcasing their interpretive gifts. The real magic tonight, in other words, is what orthography always promises, only this time viewed through living bodies: in young musicians whose groundwork has been laid, one glimpses, in the elevation and scale of their musicality, the future professionals they will one day become.
Not to mention that two works by the players themselves are also on display. Both Dillon Scott and The Dolphins mix composition and improvisation with their performance practice, a healthy activity for any creative. The expansion of a musician’s toolkit can only ever serve them well: sensibility is clarified as it crosses medial boundaries. In both works tonight, the priority is on musical moments: it is in Scott’s title, and in the Dolphins’s characteristic miniature captures of their surroundings. Music here is a capture technique for preserving the aura of life’s unrepeatable flickers.
Now linguistic orthography attends with great detail to—among many other things—the historical moments in which speech enters into writing, when sound first fixes on the paper as a series of recognizable signs, malleable in their order but firm in their signification. Scott and the Dolphins, we might say, are after something of the same moment: this music speaks to the instant when a feeling in an environment crystallizes into something knowable and transmittable: tonight we hear feelings at the moment they becomes legible. Where orthography will tell you the codification of language permits its breakage and extravagant free play, the musical memorialization of these precious moments in time too turns them plastic and tactile, allowing both Scott and the quartet free reign to continue to return to such special memories and splash in their emotional depths.
On the architectural side of things, I want to return to Vitruvius and draw out a curious little phrase: slightly shadowed, he says, a characteristic essential to orthography. The relief of space is achieved above all by varying shades of light, themselves a trick of artificial and artistic means.
The Adagio from Brahms’s first Piano Trio is a thing of wonder—the whole trio is, really, but the adagio more than most. It takes a bizarre form, a kind of permanent hovering and rotating in place, alternating between piano and strings. It is a movement which goes nowhere and does nothing. The beauty of the thing—in some ways anticipating more pointed experiments by modern composers—emerges instead in the gradations of light and shadow that every harmony, every texture, every rhythm drawn here in so slow and plaintive a pace, cast upon the whole. The movement’s sectional structure is clarified not by immense contrasts in material but by slowly revealed gradations in how they are shaded: it teaches you to hear its small differences. And when, by the end, the piano begins to walk in tiny steps over the arch of the string chorale, one is not sure whether the light is fading or rising, so enfolded have we become in its many hollows, corners, and rays.
And Mozart—it is no great leap of criticism to point out that he’s an architect first. But you find him at his most attentive when he has to get from one place to another. (He gets this from Bach and passes it down through German lineage; the music of Helmut Lachenmann, the last living inheritor of that legacy, is founded on that principle.) In some ways, Mozart’s dazzling melodies are just blank shapes, lovely and precious and wonderful to the ear but themselves only building blocks. They’re the blueprint. Where Mozart really heats up is when he takes those pure shapes and begins to morph them into an architecture of change.
The first movement of the First Piano Quartet is a masterclass in these transformational shadings. Titled in G minor but refusing to stay put, the movement flirts endlessly with its relative major as a means of both destabilizing the home key while making it all the more visceral and fearsome. This constant zig-zag between the major and the minor is played out in a host of transitional gestures—sometimes sequences, sometimes sudden drops, here slow reimaginings, there rapid flight—which are nothing more or less than orthography
itself. Mozart, having drawn the geometric blueprint with each pure melody, begins to shade until the architecture begins to rise. He turns the figure to another side, shading as he goes; he rotates again, elevating here. Until at last—in the final minute, the long series of harmonies unable to decide which way to tile—the complete diagram appears like a magical vision before vanishing. It is in these passages of material on their way to becoming otherwise that one can hear Mozart’s architectural pencil hardest at work.