reviews
Michael Pisaro - harmony series 11-16 / an unrhymed chord
A couple of releases from this year written by the Los Angeles based composer Michael Pisaro. As well as teaching composition at the California Institute of Arts, Pisaro can also be identified as a member of the Wandelweiser group, a loose, mainly European collective of composers writing and presenting work that often continues in the tradition of John Cage, exploring the possibilities of extended silence and time structures in music.
The first of these releases, harmony series 11-16 presents realisations of nine of the thirty-four pieces written in the series, and are performed here by the septet of Johnny Chang, (violin) James Orsher, (harmonium) Kathryn Pisaro, (oboe and English horn) Marc Sabat, (violin) Mark So, (piano) Greg Stuart, (percussion) and Michael Pisaro himself on guitar and sine tones. Across the nine pieces the ensemble plays in different formations, with no more than five of the group playing on any one track.
Alongside his compositional work Pisaro has also translated the poetry of Oswald Egger from German to English for a recent American publication. It is the process of translation that provided Pisaro with the inspiration for the harmony series. Each of the thirty-four compositions take a different poem as their starting point. For the pieces that appear on the CD works by Robert Creeley, Paul Celan, Robert Lax, George Oppen, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens provided the initial inspiration but the entire series utilises the work of some twenty-two writers.
In his brief sleeve notes to the release, percussionist Greg Stuart provides a description of the “translation” process used by Pisaro. He talks of the architecture, the material and the point of contact within each piece. Stuart’s words are fittingly poetic, suggesting at the processes used without clearly defining them. In truth, clear definition of how Pisaro translates the poetry into the text scores used by the performers is not easy. The architecture stage of the process is the easiest to explain. Pisaro uses the written structure of the poem to form a frame for the musical work. Perhaps a four line poem would result in a four section composition. A poem made up of three verses might be scored for three performers, and so on. For each piece this transmutation could be different, as there are no firmly written rules throughout the series.
The material stage of the translation process is far more complicated to define. If the architectural stage of translating a poem from one language to another might be to substitute words directly and place them into sentences, the material stage could be defined as the process of ensuring the poem’s original sentiment and meaning is preserved. Within the musical translations the material stage goes beyond this, though finding a satisfactory description of the process is not easy. Pisaro is not trying to preserve or replicate the meaning of the poem within a new medium. Rather than create a musical picture in response to the sentiment of the poem Pisaro engages directly with the body of the text, aligning the music to how the words of the poem develop and change, and in some places allowing even individual letters to suggest musical operations. As Stuart states in his notes a section of the text suggesting proliferation may result in the composed sound rising from barely to clearly audible. Elsewhere an aggressive punchy line might result in busier or faster musical instructions. Quite often the link between text and score is hard to ascertain, perhaps a result of Pisaro’s own individual reading of the particular poem at hand.
The end result of these two stages is a set of thirty-four text scores. All of them leave considerable room for interpretation by the musicians. Particular pitches are never mentioned, instead loosely defined dynamics or perhaps instructions to “choose a tone in the lower part of the instrument’s register” often appear. In keeping with much of Pisaro’s work soft sounds and lengthy pauses are prescribed, on these occasions though perhaps this is as much a result of his choice of poem as it is a characteristic of his compositional voice. Given that the works are rarely written for particular instruments the scores place the music into musical spaces that will be familiar to those that know the output of the Wandelweiser label, and yet leave a lot of scope for the musicians to decide the precise form of each performance.
It is the musicians’ realisation of these text scores that forms the third stage of Stuart’s understanding of the translation process, the point of contact. The music presented on the CD is restful, quiet, and yes poetic. A minimal chamber music feel resides throughout the nine pieces that range from two to twenty minutes in length. Traditional instruments provide most of the sounds, though sine tones and Stuart’s grainy percussion in particular often introduce a textural depth into the music.
Unfortunately the scores themselves are not included with the CD liner notes. Publishing rights costs probably precluded their inclusion but it is also possible that Pisaro intended the music to stand alone, the product of a process rather than just a part of it. Taken alone the music presented here is exceptionally beautiful, nine finely constructed little pools of calm. Understanding the process of the music’s development however adds a further, thoroughly engaging dimension and so I recommend you beg, buy or borrow a copy of the scores if you possibly can.
The second of these Michael Pisaro releases on Wandelweiser does not suffer from this problem. The text score for an unrhymed chord is just a handful of lines long and fits easily into the liner notes for this two disc set. The piece, written for any number of performers lasts sixty-five minutes and is split into two half hour long segments separated by five minutes of complete silence. The musicians are then asked to provide one single sound, preferably with pitch and lasting between one and fifteen minutes, that they can then place once into each of the two halves of the composition. The length of the sound can change from the first half to the last, and its loudness should be in inverse proportion to its length.
Each of the two discs contains a complete realisation of the score. The second of the two was compiled by Joseph Kudirka, a composer in his own right about whom I know little beyond his current position as a student at Huddersfield University in the UK. Kudirka asked thirty-five musicians (including himself and Pisaro) to send him digital files of their chosen (mainly electronic) sound and precise instruction on where they should be placed. Along with Pisaro he then edited and mastered the resultant work, using a mathematical system for controlling the volume versus duration ratio. This process of compiling the work, not dissimilar to that used by the improvisational supergroup MIMEO on their 2007 release sight meant that each musician was unaware of the others’ placement of sound when they provided their individual contribution.
The end result is a drifting mass of overlapping textures and tones that constantly presents the listener with surprising events and interesting blends of sound. As the thirty sounds come and go it becomes very difficult to tell how many you are listening to at once, and trying to trace where a sound made in the first half of the piece reappears in the second is close to impossible. Pisaro’s reason for placing the five minute silence midway through the composition is unclear, but here it provides a welcome point for the listener to rest and recharge their senses before setting off again in the second half.
Naturally the use of such chance methods in creating music means that in some places Kudirka’s realisation of the score works better than in others. On occasion the layering of similar sounds can feel a little too much and perhaps a version using less musicians would have been more consistent. Overall the music is still very alluring however and an example of how a seemingly simple set of musical instructions can result in a work of great depth and detail.
The version of an unrhymed chord that occupies the other disc in the set was performed by Greg Stuart alone. Like the Kudirka version the piece is compiled from seventy soundfiles recorded by Stuart that are then multitracked together on a computer to create the final piece. Stuart is therefore taking the role of seventy different musicians for this realisation of the score. He created all of the sounds using friction, caressing all kinds of percussive instrument, household items and found objects with a variety of methods to create a highly compatible set of soft, resonating sounds. These sounds, again measuring between one and fifteen minutes in length were then placed by chance within the two half-hour timeframes and their volume levels within the mix adjusted dependant on their length.
Perhaps because all of the sounds come from the hands of one musician and were created with their interactivity very much in mind, this version of an unrhymed chord folds together much more naturally than the Kudirka version. Although more than twice the number of sounds are involved the music feels lighter and more subtle. It does not in fact sound like composed music at all, or even the work of a percussionist as the gentle, often ghostly sounds slip over each other. Full of clean, transparent tones interacting with each other, Stuart’s realisation of Pisaro’s score here is a truly beautiful thing. Before his involvement with these two releases I was unaware of Greg Stuart as a musician but will certainly seek out further works he is involved with if these collaborations with Pisaro are anything to go by.
So two releases of great beauty founded within the restraint / freedom of written scores. Finding the balance between strict notation and complete improvisation is an art in itself, and these two CD releases highlight excellent examples of how this can be done successfully. Two more very strong additions to the catalogue of both Michael Pisaro and the Wandelweiser label.
Richard Pinnell
Tags: Wandelweiser
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This sounds great, looking forward to put my hands on these discs.
Thanks Richard for the detailed review, as I am not familiar with Pisaro’s work.
Very insightful review of these 2 great releases Richard. They are 2 great ones indeed.
Thanks Barry.
You of course know an unrhymed chord very well yourself, having recorded two very nice versions recently ;)
yes, i know that one very well, thank you! i am still working my way through several solo guitar pieces of Pisaro’s as well. really fantastic writing, wonderful concepts of sound & space. Lately i have been listening to HARMONY SERIES every few days. i just love that one.