Katarina Miljkovic - From Time to Time

Katarina Miljkovic
From Time to Time
Sachimay

The boundaries at the far edges of the continuum running between total alea and complete compositional control are ever-changing. When one instructs an orchestra to perform a through-composed piece “exactly as written,” but tells each player to cut up his/her part, throw it in the air, and paste it back together just as it landed before playing the first note, there’s a ceding of compositional control, without any additional freedom accruing to the performers. In such a piece, the gods, not the musicians, get the latitude. Again, composers may partially yield their own creative instincts to the discipline of a particular key signature, tone row, mathematical theory, or group of improvisers, but such loss of authority may be only temporary. Given today’s post-production technologies, composers can wrest back ultimate control of what a piece will sound like by re-sequencing, re-pitching, re-almost anything. For all I know, it may be possible in this way to turn a Derek Bailey solo into an exact facsimile of a Mozart string quartet.

These musings were prompted by the newly recorded work of Yugoslavian composer Katarina Miljkovic, several of whose wonderful pieces have been released by Sachimay. Ms. Miljkovic, the first recipient of a doctorate in composition from New England Conservatory, has obviously thought a good deal about the nature of musical creation and control: the pieces on run the gamut of the continuum mentioned above—all to excellent result. “Rondo” for string orchestra, as originally written in 1986, must have sounded something like John Adams’ “Shaker Loops”. It was, clearly, a nice example of thick, luxurious minimalism. It may have been psychedelic, but it was also tonal enough to be comfortable in the second Reagan administration. It’s doesn’t sound like that anymore. In its 2002 incarnation as “Sequence for String Orchestra”, it’s a nightmare of strings and beetles and muffled screams. Ms. Miljkovic carried out this transformation from velvet into molton lava by resequencing a recording of a performance by Aleksandar Pavlovic and the Belgrade String Orchestra. The disk includes two versions of her “13/5”. The first, from 1999, is a transcription for computer-generated piano sounds of a group of numbers chosen from a Fibonacci series. The result, because of its breakneck speed and its simulation of a six-handed robot pianist, sounds like a Conlon Nancarrow piece for player piano, only it’s faster, lusher, and more menacing than anything the quirkier Nancarrow turned out. In the second palimpseste, from 2002, excerpts from the earlier version were chosen by a group of free improvisers (Zachary Lucas, Tony Kieraldo, Michael Gamble and Jo Dematteo) and used, like a rabbit at a dog race, to propel their high-velocity chase. Ms. Miljkovic made a number of recordings of these accompanied improvs. She then imported all the resulting channels into a sequencing program, some of which she used to twist, massage and rearrange into this version of “13/5”. With the additional timbres strewn alongside the on-rushing piano, one might think the many-fingered robot of the first version had sprouted siblings who handle guitar, percussion and sax with the same sort of impossibly frantic capacity. At 31 minutes, “Forest” is the central work on the disc, and it unfolds at a more leisurely pace than its companions. It’s a piece for two prepared pianos (Jon Sakata and Jung Mi Lee), and three percussionists (Michael Gardiner, Lei Liang, and Miljkovic) whose resources are limited to prayer bowls, rain sticks and a sea drum. This score is been completely written out. According to Ms. Miljkovic, the structure resembles that of a natural forest, because the sounds branch out (like a tree) “based on self-similarity principles...characteristic of fractals.” But there are Earle Brown-style gaps in the architectural control here. First, not all the players play this score in the same direction—some start at “the beginning” some at “the end.” Also, the durations of the sound events are intentionally vague, along the lines of “slower than evolution,” “moderate,” and “too fast for words.” Each player interprets these tempi instructions in his/her own way, while listening to the other forest plants and animals. This results in a delicious interplay that will vary with each performance (depending, we might say, on climatic factors). The result is a dreamy piece, along the lines of Feldman or Brown, that seems to tell us as much about the distant reaches of empty space as it does about opulent neighboring fauna. It is entirely captivating. This is an excellent disc, on which Katarina Miljkovic proves to be both a penetrating theorist and a sensitive artist.