The current exhibition at the Worcester Fine art Museum, From Kennedy to Kent State, consists of an extensive series of images drawn from the leading photojournalists of the 1960s, all of them more familiar to persons of a certain age, and almost of them familiar (from history books) to younger fry. As the title suggests, the show includes photos connected with the incomplete, violently interrupted presidency of John F. Kennedy and photos taken in Vietnam during the increasing American involvement in the war and the growing anti-war activities at home. But it also includes some happier images—mostly those continued with the rising of popular musical artists of the day (some rock and folk musicians, the Beatles, and some whose lives were cutting short by drugs), visual artists introducing minimalism and other popular trends of the day, the worlds of manner and celebrity, and the triumph of the moon landing just at the end of the decade. Only for the nigh part the mood of the exhibition is set by images of three assassinations (the Kennedys and Martin Luther Rex), the darkness and the courage of the struggles for civil rights for African Americans peculiarly, and the increasing violence both in Vietnam and at home as the state of war and protests against it increased.
As is normal with such events, the Museum has scheduled a series of programs related to the show, two of which are musical: On October 14th American Century Music, a freely organized group created and run by conductor Scott Parkman, appeared in the form of a string quartet to play works composed by leading American composers correct in the center of the period represented by the visual show, from 1963 to 1967. (A second program recalling the concert that Pablo Casals gave in the White House in 1961—the great cellist'due south first advent in the state for decades—featuring members of the Worcester Sleeping accommodation Music Society, will take place on January thirteenth.)
The '60s saw a flourishing of folk music (Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Kingston Trio, and others), who increasingly emphasized songs of protest equally the war in Vietnam dragged on. And it marked the British Invasion of rock and the rising of new American stone artists, some of them withal performing today, others whose careers came to sudden, drug-fueled ends in the decade that saw their flowering. Many of the photographs in the exhibition evoke the glories and sorrows of that era.
But one important attribute of American music of that menses has been largely overlooked: the concert music in the classical tradition, which was also created by a big number of gifted composers, mostly using some version of the modernist language developed by Schoenberg and his followers earlier in the century. Such music never attracted the large audiences that the popular artists did, of course. It was not hummable. Information technology rarely had texts that could propose a manning of the barricades. Still it was only as much of the period equally Dylan, Baez, the Beatles, Joplin, and the others. Information technology was non "pretty" music considering those were not pretty times.
As a member of that generation, I remember all too well sitting in the dining hall at college fifty years ago, just after President Kennedy announced that Soviet missiles were being delivered to Cuba and that the U.S. government was evaluating possible responses. On that October evening in 1962, we seriously discussed whether any of us were likely to be alive at Christmas. And the two years that followed brought iii traumatic assassinations and a sudden increase in the state's involvement in Vietnam; our "advisers" had turned into a full army, pursuing a war that many thought pointless and incorrect-headed and that seemed as if it would never terminate.
Music equanimous in such times certainly does not evoke the periwigged graciousness of European courts, or fifty-fifty the jazzy swing of New York nightspots. The musical language was intense, largely dissonant in character, with complicated rhythms (virtually no toe-tapping), calling for players of neat technical accomplishment to offer even a minimally effective performance.
Scott Parkman, the founder and artistic director of American Century Music, assembled a first rate string quartet to perform four meaning and varied works by major composers equanimous in the heart of the '60s, bringing dorsum the dark thoughts of those days equally caught in the works of leading composers.
The quartet consisted of three well-established old easily in Boston music-making: violinists Gabriela Diaz and Katherine Winterstein and cellist David Russell; to them was added an increasingly agile young violist, Wenting Kang, still a master'south candidate at the New England Conservatory. Their playing in the two string quartet pieces was dynamic, taut, and powerfully expressive. Each half of the plan began with a piece of work for an unaccompanied stringed musical instrument with which Russell and Diaz made a strong event.
Roger Sessions's Half-dozen Pieces for Violoncello (1966) are brief but intensely dramatic, alternating faster movements that may be heard as expressively tormented with slower ones that are more tranquil but inappreciably "sweet" (the primal Berceuse, or "lullaby," is naturally the nigh relaxed of the set). The unabridged serial covers the cello's broad range in pitch and demands the command of dynamics from full throttle to the merest whisper. David Russell was electrifying in meeting these demands.
The solo work in the second half was Steve Reich's Violin Phase (1967) for solo violin with a prerecorded version of the music played back digitally (it could alternatively be played by 4 violins alive). This piece adumbrated a meaning change in American music at just about that fourth dimension: the development of a new simplicity in harmony, particularly, as a response to the intensity of non-tonal music but after the midcentury. This new style, which came to exist known as "minimalism," began in the visual arts with works oftentimes based on small images repeated over and over in a large-scale pattern. This early on Reich piece similarly plays with a tiny effigy running but seven beats with four dissimilar pitches, which is played over and over and over from beginning to cease. Gabriela Diaz was the solo player who gave information technology the fierce concentration required to perform just slightly faster than same part in an electronic recording. Her master line gradually moves ahead of the other, until eventually it "laps" the prerecorded part similar a racer steadily heading to the finish line a full excursion ahead of the other. As the parts diverge, the effect of the ensemble changes kaleidoscopically. Diaz maintained that concentration and the strenuous repetition required from beginning to breathless conclusion.
Of the two string quartets offered, David Diamond'south Cord Quartet No. vii (1963-64) was the more than traditional, employing such classical structural features equally theme and variations in the first (of two) complex movements and an elaborate extended fugue in the second. The aggressive opening figure consists of two quarter notes a half-step autonomously. The first of these, in the start violin, consists of D and Due east-flat in octaves. When this is echoed past similar semitone figures densely overlapping in the other voices, it struck these ears every bit a possible reference to Shostakovich's musical motto, DSCH (D, E-flat, C, B-natural in German note), or possible an inversion of Bach'due south BACH (B-flat, A, C, B-natural). The second one-half of either motto is not literal, but those mottoes are then familiar in many circles, and the quartet makes such frequent reference to it throughout both movements, that information technology is hard not to call back of it in part as an homage. The xiii variations that grade the heart of the start movement are marvelously varied, with stiff divergence between, say, Variation nine (all pizzicatos and staccatos) and Variation 10 (heavy, sustained four-part counterpoint in marcato). The lengthy fundamental office of the 2nd movement is a dense fugue (it is not articulate to me why Diamond labels it "Fuga seconda," since there is non formal outset fugue in the piece). With all its frequent change of color and texture, the quartet is a massive, driven score, which the players projected with tremendous energy.
The program closed with Leon Kirchner'southward Quartet No. iii for Strings and Electronic Record (1966), which received the composer's Pulitzer Prize for music. Electronic music appears only rarely in Kirchner's music, though the menstruation of the 1960s was a time when many composers experimented with its possibilities. The challenge in combining live performers with an electronically created role on tape, specially for a composer of Kirchner's rhapsodically expressive music, is that live players always differ from one performance to the next, while the tape never changes in tempo, interrelationship of the parts or otherwise (disallowment a technical failure). It was this outcome that Kirchner (and others at the fourth dimension) establish quite absorbing. The other difficulty of the early 1960s was that the technology of creating the electronic sounds was withal pretty much in its infancy. A one-half century later computers offering far more than flexibility and ease of creation. Anyone listening to the electronic part of the score will find information technology hard non to call up of the "bleeps" and "bloops" of science fiction films.
Yet Kirchner's quartet, bandage equally a unmarried motility with "solo" and "ensemble" passages and an extended electronic coda at the finish, is by no ways as airheaded piece, as the passage of time might accept fabricated it seem. Much of the electronic part is rhythmic (starting with elementary clicks, then bongo-similar sounds), only it gradually becomes more than varied and primal. The presence of the audio technician (James Borchert) is crucial here. Again the string quartet entered beautifully into the spirit of the slice, capturing the sustained opening hush from which the tape first emerges equally a self-sufficient part, and driving the full energy of the climactic passages. A work like this is best heard in live operation in lodge to permit each of the parts to make its fullest effect, and the performance at the Worcester Fine art Museum was a splendid conclusion to the program.
Steven Ledbetter is a free-lance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth Higher in the 1970s, then became program analyst at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1999.
Source: https://www.classical-scene.com/2012/10/21/kent-state-music/
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