The Perilous Night
29 April 2007
School of Music, University of Auckland
Graduation recital. Music by John Cage, György Ligeti, Jonathan Harvey and Tzenka Dianova, in collaboration with composer Charlotte Rose.
'The piano is like money: it’s enjoyable only for those who know how to use it.' (Erik Satie, from "Musings of a Mule")
After reading the above citation by Satie, it occurred to me that an hour-and-a-half solo piano recital might indeed be a taxing experience for the audience. And so I decided to compile a program in which each piece is for a (comparatively) different media, so as to keep my listeners fresh and amused. Organizing such an event proved most challenging, and I am very grateful to Charlotte Rose, Peter Kerr and Clint Hutzulak for all their help!
This concert is dedicated to my dear teacher, Prof. Tamas Vesmas.
John Cage (1912-1992) — The Perilous Night (1944) for prepared piano solo
The Perilous Night is one of the cornerstone works in Cage’s oeuvre. It was his first major “concert” (i.e. not written for a dance accompaniment) work for prepared piano solo.
The work consists of six untitled movements; it was written in a period when Cage felt very confused and sad as a result of his separation from his wife Xenia, and even more probably, from the bitterness that had tinged the latter years of their relationship.
In Cage’s words: “The Perilous Night concerned the loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy.” The music sounds melancholic, lost and desperate; it “tells a story of the dangers of the erotic life and describes the misery of ‘something that was together that is split apart.’’’
Cage had invested a great deal of personal feelings in this work; feelings which, unfortunately, were completely lost on the audience at the piece’s premiere. “I had poured a great deal of emotion into the piece, and obviously, I wasn’t communicating this at all.” One of the music critics present at the premiere characterized the piece as sounding like “a woodpecker in a belfry.”
This bitter experience became an aesthetic turning point for the composer, and convinced him to move away from the expression of intimate or sentimental feelings through his art.
Cage has mentioned that the title of this work was inspired by Irish folklore, in which he was deeply interested; the idea for it had come from Joseph Campbell’s recounting of an Irish myth concerning a perilous bed, resting on a floor of polished jasper. This perilous bed figures in the Arthurian legends, and is described as a bed plain in appearance, used as a resting place for those seeking The Holy Grail. The knights venturing to lie upon it were subjected to vicious attacks by invisible enemies launching spears at them.
Another parallel could be made between the title of The Perilous Night and a line from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, where Cassius, the instigator in the conspiracy against Caesar, says: “For my part, I have walk’d about the streets, / Submitting me unto the perilous night…”.
Tzenka Dianova (b.1971) & Charlotte Rose (b.1963) — First DeConstruction (The Perilous Night) (April 2007) for an un-preparing piano and pre-recorded and live electronics
DeConstruction is about recycling. The idea for this work came to me as I was un-preparing my piano from a practice for The Perilous Night. I thought what a pity it was that the beautiful sounds produced during the un-preparing process were being “wasted”, i.e. not getting the chance to be heard and appreciated. Then I thought that perhaps they could be “preserved” after all. My initial idea was to have an “un-preparing improvisation”, during which the ensuing sounds would be processed, mixed and played back by a computer. The collaboration process with electronic music composer Charlotte Rose brought fresh ideas, and eventually we decided to have a pre-recorded-material part, with sounds generated from both a performance of The Perilous Night, and the un-preparing process following it. The piece, as presented tonight, is an alloy of the pre-recorded part, composed by Charlotte Rose, and the live sounds resulting from un-preparing the instrument, which in turn are computer-processed real-time.
The piece is a tribute to John Cage and his First Construction (in Metal), for which he first prepared the piano.
Tzenka Dianova — VexEitaS (January-April 2007) for prepared piano and animated text
VexEitaS is a tribute to Erik Satie (1866-1925) and his mystifying piano composition Vexations (1893). I have forever been fascinated by this work and considering its performance. I did not, however, agree with the current (and not-so-current) practice of interpreting the piece as a chain of 840 “da capo al fine” repetitions, lasting from 20 – 28 hours. On the other hand, I did not feel that repeating the motif for an hour or less would be an effective solution guaranteeing a meaningful performance.
I decided to prepare the piano with metal objects, and to repeat the motif for 840 seconds, or 14 minutes. The resulting music was recorded and married to a text, selected from Satie’s writings.
When I first saw/heard the ready piece, I found that the music had become somewhat of a “background”; it was almost unnoticeable — an intriguing occurrence, considering that Satie himself coined the terms “furniture” and “wallpaper” music.
György Ligeti (1923-2006) — Musica Ricercata (1951-53) for piano solo
- Sostenuto-Misurato-Stringendo poco a poco sin al Prestissimo
- Mesto, rigido e ceremoniale
- Allegro con spirito
- Tempo di Valse (poco vivace – “å l’orgue de Barbarie”)
- Rubato. Lamentoso
- Allegro molto capriccioso
- Con moto, giusto [left hand] Cantabile, molto legato [right hand]
- Vivace. Energico
- (Béla Bartók in memoriam) Adagio. Mesto
- Vivace. Capriccioso
- (Omaggio a Girolamo Frescobaldi) Andante misurato e tranquillo
This coming June we will sadly mark the first anniversary of Ligeti’s death, and tonight’s performance of Musica Ricercata is dedicated to the composer who left us pianists a great inheritance, already accepted as “XX-century classic”.
Musica Ricercata, Ligeti’s first large cycle for the piano, was written as an “experiment to create new music from nothing”. What the composer humorously referred to as “nothing” was his use of minimal structures and pitch material, to create a large-scale work.
The cycle consists of eleven short pieces, where the first explores a single pitch, with a second pitch added at the very end. The second piece is built around three pitches, the third around four, and so on, until the eleventh piece, which utilizes all twelve pitches.
These eleven short movements, which reveal a strong reverence for Bartok’s music, can be described as “character pieces”. In a “microcosmos-macrocosmos” manner, each one creates a powerful and lasting atmosphere of its own, whether it is intensely rhythmic dance, macabre ceremony, child’s play, “pastoral”, barrel organ tune, church chant, “organ” fugue etc.
The seventh piece, for a first time in piano literature, presents the use of poly-tempo. Before Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata, Bartok used polyrhythm; Charles Ives used poly-metre in his piano works and poly-tempo in his orchestral works. Conlon Nancarrow created poly-tempo pieces for a player piano. But it was Ligeti, in his Musica Ricercata, that for the first, and perhaps the only time, challenged a single performer with the demanding task of playing two parts in two different tempos simultaneously.
Those who have seen Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographic work Eyes Wide Shut will probably recognize the second piece from Musica Ricercata as the blood-chilling tune played throughout the macabre “black mass” ceremony.
Jonathan Harvey (b.1939) — Tombeau de Messiaen (1994) for piano and tape
In the composer’s own words, “this work is a modest offering in response to the death of a great musical and spiritual presence. Messiaen was a protospectralist, that is to say, he was fascinated by the colours of the harmonic series and its distortions, and found therein a prismatic play of light. The tape part of my work is composed of piano sounds entirely tuned to harmonic series — twelve of them, one for each class of pitch. The 'tempered' live piano joins and distorts these series, never entirely belonging, never entirely separate.”
Tombeau de Messiaen was commissioned and premiered by Philip Mead, and dedicated to him and to Jake Harvey Tavener who was born ten hours before Tombeau was finished.
© 2007 Tzenka Dianova. Use by permission only.
