If things can be done, they surely will be. The extraordinary developments in music in recent decades were prompted in part by the electronic revolution, in part by widening notions of what music is, and in part by the increasing versatility and virtuosity of performers. Six hundred years ago, it was the same, but with the stimulus coming from a new, more exact language of musical notation that encouraged composers to try out more complex rhythms, harmonies, and textures. Tonight we hear from these medieval explorers, as well as their modern counterparts.

MICHAEL MAIERHOF (b. 1956)
Sugar 1

The German composer Michael Maierhof came to the art of creating music late, in his early thirties, after studies of mathematics, philosophy, and art history, as well as music. In the last decade he has become hugely productive, of pieces for soloists or small groups, often involving electronics and sometimes also with video components. Space, too, is important to his work, as is an edgy understanding of repetition and echo. A cd of his music, collection_1, was released on the Austrian label Durian in 2006, and includes Sugar 1, which dates from 2001. Many of his works come in series: Sugar 2 (2001-3) is for soprano and five instrumentalists, Sugar 3 (2002-4) for accordion and bass.

He chose the title, he has said, “because it suggests the contrary of what the piece is,” and because it confronts, also, the “aesthetic of titles in German new music.” But the choice was not simply contradictory, for the composer was inspired also by a piece by Yukio Fujimoto exhibited at the 2001 Venice Biennale, with “rotating little sugar cubes.”

Playing for about fifteen minutes, the composition is scored for a traditional formation: the piano trio, comprising violin, cello, and piano. However, connections with Haydn and Schubert end there. Maierhof doesn’t use the piano’s keyboard but has the musician operate within the instrument with various objects (clay and plastic vessels, golf balls), and he asks that the performers be placed at a distance from one another, not together as a normal chamber group. Extremity is there in full, and slices of silence enhance the anxiety, chopping the music into revolving blocks that enforce—and exceed—the original visual image.

New music circa 1400:

JOHANNES SYMONIS HASPROIS (fl. 1378–1428)
Puisque je suis fumeux

INTERLUDE BASED ON JACOB SENLECHES (fl. 1382/3–1395)
La Harpe de melodie

JEAN VAILLANT (fl. ?1360–90)
Par maintes fois

JOHANNES CICONIA (c. 1370–1411), arr. Shira Kammen
Estampie “Amor per te sempre”

CICONIA
Una panthera

MATTEO DA PERUGIA (fl. 1400–1416)
Trover ne puis aucunemant confort

SOLAGE (fl. late 14th. century)
Fumeux fume par fumee

Some of the terms in medieval music are not so old: “ars subtilior” (subtler art) dates back only to 1960, when a scholar introduced it to denote music that took the practices of “ars nova” (new art) to extremes of rhythmic intricacy and harmonic confusion. Within the style of “ars nova,” named for a treatise written by the French theorist-composer Philippe de Vitry around 1322, composers were able to write songs that were more supple in rhythm, longer, and more expressive. Along with Vitry himself, Guillaume de Machaut was one of the leading exponents of this style. The composers of “ars subtilior” took everything further, and made music strange again—even at times bizarre.

These composers were born a generation or two after Machaut and Vitry, in the middle decades of the 14th. century, and worked at various courts in France, Italy, and the Iberian peninsula. Thus widely separated, they were brought together in the pages of various volumes of songs, collections assembled for noble connoisseurs. We know very little of the composers’ lives (not even a first name in the case of Solage), and not much of their music, except in the case of Ciconia. What songs survive must represent only a tiny fraction of this repertory, so distant and so close.

Most of the “ars subtilior” composers came from France or Flanders (Matteo de Perugia was, of course, an exception), and French was the language of their songs, which follow the fixed forms of French tradition—in particular, the ballade, rondeau, and virelai. The ballade stanza has two segments, of which the first involves a musical repetition; the song by Hasprois is of this type. The items by Matteo (who wrote French songs even though he worked in Milan) and Solage exemplify the rondeau, where the eight lines form a pattern of verses and refrains. The virelai, represented by the Vaillant and Senleches numbers, again has two sections, of which the second is repeated before a return to the first. Ciconia’s “Una panthera”—by a composer who was born in Liège but spent most of his working life as a priest-musician in Padua—counts as a madrigal by virtue of its Italian text, but is similar in form to a ballade.

The complications of “ars subtilior” begin with the words. In “La Harpe de melodie,” it is the composer who sings of his own song. One of the two sources, a manuscript now in the Newberry Library in Chicago, has the music inscribed as if on the strings of a harp, with another poem, a rondeau, written on a ribbon wound around one side of the instrument. This second poem provides instructions for how to make the canon work between the two upper voices. (The manuscript is illustrated on the cover of Richard Hoppin’s textbook Medieval Music.) Rhythmic complexity is a feature of the music, as it is of Matteo’s rondeau, which marks the extreme of “ars subtilior” melodic ornateness and exquisitely weird harmony.

Among the other pieces, those by Hasprois and Solage refer to “smoking”—almost certainly not to be understood literally in Europe before Columbus, but perhaps an activity of the mind, such as these songs ironically suggest in their words and in their smoky harmonies. Vaillant shows how the highly artificial language of “ars subtilior” could be used for natural depiction, and Ciconia takes it on toward the clarity, precision, and passion of the Renaissance.

VINKO GLOBOKAR (b. 1934)
Dialog über Luft

Born in France of Slovenian family, Globokar, as a trombonist, was one of the new virtuosos of the sixties, and pieces were written for him by Berio (Sequenza V), Stockhausen, and Kagel. His own compositions tend to engage fluidly with performers, as in the case of this solo, written in 1994 for tonight’s guest artist, and recorded by him on his album Push Pull (hat[now]ART 131). The piece uses a lot of extraordinary effects—new timbres and textures, glissandos with trills, cross-rhythms that might make Matteo de Perugia smile—as well as unexpected ordinary ones. This is a dialogue on air (Dialog über Luft) partly in that what the accordion produces is colored air, but also because the instrument, like a pair of lungs, breathes—and gasps.

“It’s very funny to hear someone say that the true poet is one who inspires: for lots of schmucks a useful person is one who transpires. I like to think that good music is that which respires; so that it can sing higher, he offers it a helium cylinder and says: Aspire!”

KEIKO HARADA (b. 1968)
Bone #

Increasingly known around the world, Harada trained at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in her native Tokyo and now teaches there. She wrote the twelve-minute Bone # in 2000 for the percussionist Kuniko Kato and violinist Momoko Yamada; a recording can be found on her portrait album After the Winter (Cypres CYP5605).

The starting point, according to the composer, was the kalimba, an African instrument of tuned metal tines attached to a resonating box of wood or gourd. “Plucked with the thumbs,” Harada goes on, “it produces mysterious vibrations that seem to go on forever—a sound that led me to imagine something never to develop but only to repeat. (Is this a metaphor of Mother Nature and the African desert?).

“As a first step, I tried to understand the original character of the kalimba, as I usually do with instruments. I borrowed Kuniko Kato’s kalimba, and spent about four months with it while working on the piece. It was always part of my plan to use amplification, but soon I found I needed another instrument to allow the kalimba to live in a new way. Hence the violin. With this flexible and totally different instrument, I sensed almost limitless possibilities. Then I decided to drop one of the kalimba’s strongest features, its pentatonic tuning. Feeling a little guilty, I retuned the instrument so that the pitches became more abstract, often microtonal. Now I felt that I was free, and that the kalimba was an instrument like any other.

Harada notes also how she has concerned herself with performers’ inner states, “particularly in the temporal structure of my compositions. When I speak of inner states here, I do not refer to emotions, but rather to the practical techniques essential to performance: the way of counting the beat, the way of breathing and its control, the way of listening to sound and so forth. If new music has a definite role to play, it may be that of modifying existing modes and customs with new ideas, stimulated within the performers’ imaginations and conveyed physically to the audience.”

JOHANN JACOB FROBERGER (1616-67)
Tombeau

Froberger was one of the keyboard virtuosos of his day. Having gained the favor of the Habsburg court when only twenty, he was able to study in Rome with Frescobaldi and travel widely in northern Europe, possibly on missions of undercover diplomacy or espionage. While in Paris, in 1652, he spent an evening with Charles Fleury, sieur de Blancrocher, a musical amateur who played the lute. After they had dined and strolled, they returned to Fleury’s house, where Fleury fell downstairs and shortly afterward expired. His friend wrote this Tombeau in his memory, and even wrote an impression of the accident into the music’s final measure. Three other composers—Louis Couperin, Denis Gaultier, and François Dufaut—also composed tributes to the unfortunate lutenist.

LUCIANO BERIO (1925-2003)
Sequenza XIII (Chanson)

Like Globokar, Berio composed an accordion étude specifically for tonight’s performer, who has recorded it twice: in a compendium (Deutsche Grammophon 457 038) of Berio’s Sequenzas for diverse solo instruments, of which it was the last but one to be composed, in 1995, and on his album Chanson discrète (Winter & Winter 910 124), which also includes the Froberger piece on tonight’s program.

Like all Berio’s Sequenzas, the piece explores not only the physical possibilities of the instrument but also its network of cultural associations, which in this case have very little to do with high art, much more, as the composer noted, with “the accompaniment to songs sung during trips to the country, and to the songs of working people, of night clubs, Argentinian tangos and jazz.” Hence the subtitle: “Chanson” (Song). But, Berio goes on, there is no question of “a unifying homage to all these precedents. ‘Chanson’ only aspires to a spontaneous expression (an improvisation, a rondo) of my relationship with the accordion.” Like a rondo, or a tour of a labyrinth, the piece keeps circling back to favored sites: harmonies, melodic motifs, gestures toward absent voices.

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.