Alvin Curran is among our foremost musical landscape artists. Sometimes the landscapes evoked are gardens and water works - a sort of musical Villa d’Este. Sometimes the landscapes are interior landscapes of memory and nostalgia, but they are landscapes nonetheless. When the works on this Cd were created, and for a long time before, High Modernism had pooh poohed the very notion of musical depictions, as either impossible or else a naive endeavor. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony was deemed a lesser work, that was acceptable only because theory professors could still cram it into the sonata principle. Alexis Roland-Manuel, the ghostwriter of “Stravinsky’s” Poetics, may have claimed that music could not depict or express anything but itself. Stravinsky may have played along with the lie, but fortunately, the music that emerged from the monster that was Igor, always disproved the theory. When academic composers were trying to out-abstract one another, Curran used recording technology and electronics to create the evocative, grounded-in-the-material, recordings on this three CD set. In some circles it is still considered quite vulgar to suggest someone’s music may depict or evoke the solid world in which we wander. If I am vulgar for suggesting it about Curran, so be it. If some consider Curran vulgar and foolish for engaging in depiction, he makes them the fools, by proving that powerful art is never subject to the prejudices of “good taste.”
The works were edited and spliced, but more often than not sound like an improvisation. There was something wonderfully satisfying about finally finishing a work that involved the head-banging agony of innumerable splices of tape. It was such a painful process that finishing felt incredibly good. I think it led to a directness of expression that is often missing in the more polished products of our new-found digital world. The pieces, while “electronic tape pieces” are not built on great reliance on synthesizers, or at least not obviously so. Neither are the pieces in the tradition of Parisian musique concréte. Many involve Curran’s meandering vocalisms and his piano improvisations. There are musical quotations and evocations of diverse sorts. A piano plays Barbary Ellen, which morphs into some other song. His ersatz dhrupad singing, in head voice, never pretends to be a “real India.” However, it evokes some other place from the land where we spend our quotidian days. His vocalizations are often quite lovely.
The first CD on the set is entirely dedicated to Canti e Vedute del Giardino Magnetico (Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden). The piece is filled with bells. It evokes birds and water, and evokes a cultivated, but haunted landscape.
The second CD contains Light Flowers and Dark Flowers (Fiori Chiari Fiori Oscuri). A toy piano leads to drones that build into an increasingly intense network of fluttering motives. Sounds of child counting in Italian and telling a story lead to the street-wise voice of an adolescent boy accompanied by shimmering piano and toy piano. Somehow it all means something, even if we cannot quite summarize it. What have these young “flowers” experienced that we hear in their voices?
Canti Illuminati I begins with the sounds of a harbor, and after a melancholic meandering, ends in a hum of buzzing voices. Are harbors intrinsically melancholy?
Canti Illuminati II commences with electronically generated sounds and voices. The voice continually brings us back to something recognizably human, but no less disturbing for its familiarity. Curran’s overtone singing may not win any awards at the competitions in Tuva, but they prove Curran is ever the early adopter. Curran’s electronically generated tones may once have sounded bright and novel, but the novelty of the timbres has long since been lost. The problem of finding evocative electronic timbres still is unresolved. So many young composers these days claim to make timbre their primary means of expression. They systematically manipulate timbre, but rarely find a means to make it say something, other than “I am clever; please give me an A, or that grant. or that fellowship....” Curran’s pieces are effective, not because of unique timbres, but because Curran strings recognizable or nearly recognizable timbres together in a meaningful way. Fragments of an old, tired, wobbling voice singing a sentimental Yiddish song, or a woman singing in an Italian dialect evoke memory and longing. Our brains are not so far from the savannah, in evolutionary terms, and timbres have meanings and carry warnings. Abstract manipulations of timbres do not carry the depth of meaning of the familiar.
Curran is not embarrassed to grab whatever is useful to his music. He is not afraid to build around a triad, or to improvise an exposed, long, winding melody.
The Works is surreal landscape as seen on a journey. The Works sounds to my ear like a 70’s electronic Winterreise, complete with Schubert’s yapping dog threatening the author. We wander through animal-esque sounds. Are they wolves or dolphins? What landscape is this? The Works ends the journey through an unidentifiable, but vaguely familiar landscape, with a piano vamp of perfect “Marvin Hamlishness,” (it was the 70’s after all) that accompanies yodeling and ambient sounds (Is it a French train station?). Where have we gone? Where have we arrived?
Curran’s tape music of the 1970’s shows many paths that remain to be explored in more depth. It’s got a nice beat and is easy to dance to. I give it a Bandstand 10!