When you say "composer" to most folks, contrary to musicians' assumptions, the immediate association will be to a singer-songwriter, not a Beethoven slaving away in a garret. And that's one reason that so much of what is still called "classical" music finds itself orphaned from the public. So much of it is instrumental, acoustic, and geared toward concert presentation with the recording as an artifact, a by-product of that event. Most listeners, accustomed to albums (and now even more fragmentedly, downloads) find this not just antiquated, but inconceivable. It’s as though the creative process was set in reverse. This situation isn't universal, though; some composers continue to search for a way to make "serious" music comprehensible to a larger public, while not sacrificing its great virtues on the altar of trendiness.
Victoria Jordanova is such a composer, or even better, such a [total] musician. Born and raised in Yugoslavia, she came to the US for studies in Michigan and New York, as well as an interlude in Paris. Eventually returning to the US, she made her reputation in San Francisco, and currently lives in Los Angeles. From the outset, she has asserted herself as a "creative musician" on the harp. Using extended techniques, improvisation, theater, and technology, she’s created a series of pieces that explore the extremes of human experience, in all its passion, darkness, and ecstasy. She’s also a committed promoter and advocate of new music, and not just her own (like another great Californian predecessor, Henry Cowell). With her label ArpaViva, she’s already released music featuring a variety of composers living and dead, including the monumental Cage "Postcard From Heaven." And now, she brings us something new in means, but similar in spirit, with this collection, New York Love Songs.
There are two stimuli for this program. One is the eponymous piece Jordanova wrote in 1997-98, from which we hear four of its six songs. The other is the discovery of a brilliant and fearless young performer, Jenny Q Chai a former student of Anthony de Mare, himself a pianist who has pioneered a practice as both keyboardist and vocalist. Chai continues this new tradition within classical music, one that in fact looks like the most obvious and natural possible to those familiar with pop music.
There are several connective threads throughout this album. One, again, is the use of the pianist’s voice in every song. Chai has a pleasing approach to the instrument, terrific intonation, and great dramatic flair. She’s able to move from one state to another with seeming ease, morphing from a demonic murderer in one song, to a slightly sadistic lover in another, to a seraph in yet another. Her delivery is naturalistic without the artificiality of bel canto, but never indulges in the sort of slurred or mumbled delivery that can too often pass for "authentic" in the non-classical world.
Another connection is, of course, the theme of love. All these pieces, even the instrumental ones, deal with tenderness, passion, sensuality. The three opening works run a gamut of expression and techniques to deliver their message, and Jordanova’s songs have a similar diversity from one to the next. A third connection is Asian: Ashley Wang is from Taiwan, Chai is Chinese, Jordanova's songs set a classic Chinese poem and a text about an erotic encounter in a Chinese laundry, Cage's vocal line in its modal simplicity feels as though it's drifted in on a breeze from the Pacific. And finally there is technology and the way it affects presentation. Very much in the spirit of a popular album, the voice and its balance with the piano is crafted to make a specific, and different, impact in each individual song. Degrees of reverb, multitracking, delay, equalizing all contribute to give each track a specific timbral character that in turn heightens its communicative meaning. The recording is its own autonomous world, and while everything that happens on it can happen in live performance, there will inevitably be differences, and that’s just fine.
The first three works are all by canonical composers, albeit from a maverick canon. John Cage’s "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" sets James Joyce as a kind of incantation, accompanied by gentle knocks on the piano’s body (one of the first pieces to use the piano purely as unpitched percussion, but then not surprising from a composer who three years later wrote 4’33”, a work where the pianist does nothing but open and close the keyboard lid three times!). It serves as a kind of prayer and blessing on all to come in the next hour. Charles Ives’ "Serenity" takes John Greenleaf Whittier’s religious appeal and sets it with an "endless" ostinato on a couple of chords, an eternal rocking that only opens into more familiar hymn-harmony at the very end. Frederic Rzewski’s "Marriage (Mile 58) Section F," is an excerpt from his mammoth ongoing piano collection The Road. With text excerpted from the Tolstoy novella "Kreutzer Sonata" it breathlessly dashes through the tale of a crime of passion, told from the bewildered eyes of the murderer, and strangely, soliciting our compassion for him. Rzewski is especially skilled in how he balances voice and piano, and he should be, having written perhaps the single greatest piece in the medium to date, his setting of Oscar Wilde’s "De Profundis."
Two piano works without voice serve as interludes and bookend Jordanova’s songs. Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang’s "Intimate Rejection" revels in the opposites embodied in the title. The piece begins with a sudden muted attack on a melodic minor third (D-B), that becomes a simple, neutral rocking between the pitches. Around these isolated tones, filigree emerges and gradually creates its own internal harmony and counterpoint. The piece feels almost like a time-lapse of a plant growing. Midway through there are sudden attacks as in the opening, now in extremes of register, and once again, gentler material slowly asserts itself and grows ever more rich in detail and harmony. It seems that perhaps the icy, harsh "attack" sound and the far gentler and more lyric melodic tendrils that constitute the piece are embodiments of the title’s two extremes.
Jordanova’s New York Love Songs don’t make any overt reference to the city, but as the composer says, “In my mind, New York is the city which combines different aspects of cultures, and is also a mélange of artistic expressions and crossovers. It is also a city of romantic love, with the music of Gershwin, Broadway musicals, jazz of the 50’s, lovers walking hand in hand in the Central Park and kissing on the subway. One of the first things I saw in NY was the sculpture that dominates a corner of 6th Avenue in Manhattan: Robert "Gerry" Indiana's 'LOVE.'" And each song not only celebrates a different type of love, it creates a specific soundworld in the process. "Prayer" sets a poem by the composer, which responds to the rapture of Bernini's Roman statue of the swooning Saint Theresa. In its simple piano accompaniment, its layers of vocal lines, its multiple languages, it creates a hush of unnerving, almost unbearable vulnerability, in tune with the statue’s blend of explicit eroticism and mysticism. "Bite" is a set of instructions from the Kama Sutra that tread the thin distinction between pleasure and pain. The insistence of both the slightly laughing, teasing vocal part, and of the repeated notes and jingle-bells on the pianist, create a sound that reminds me of the atavistic songs of Harry Partch and Meredith Monk. "Chinese Laundry Across the Street" tells a little story of repeated encounters that the listener can assume are as innocent or wicked, as much reality or fantasy, as one wishes. The interplay of clearly motivic melody with spoken narration explores a range of vocal deliveries, and reminds us of Jordanova’s roots in European expressionism (though the harmonica would not be a standard instrument in fin de siècle Vienna!). Finally, "Moon" sets Su Shi’s 11th century poem, in Chinese. The song was written as an addition to the original cycle, upon Chai’s suggestion. It bespeaks a love that languishes, lingers, and hopefully survives separation. Its sound is Asian without referencing any obvious tropes, beyond elegantly shaped and refined modal lines in both voice and piano. Only near its end does a livelier, dancing spirit enter to suggest a happy ending to the longing.
Jordanova’s "Loveling" is itself a kind of answer to Wang’s subtle but real dichotomies. It feels like a resolution, an acceptance of tenderness, and of the pain it can bring as well. Here we have a meditation on yearning: a slowly cycling bass line, a chaconne equally at home in the Baroque or contemporary pop, over which ever-more rich variations cast their web. The result is a nocturne, and if Chopin comes to mind, why not? This is a Slav writing, after all.
One characteristic of American music, a tradition Jordanova considers an adoptive one, is a willingness to go it alone, to make it up as one goes, and to invent whatever means necessary to execute a vision. All the music on this disc meets those criteria, and at the end, the listener feels that s/he has experienced an intense yet gentle, even seductive, encounter with a series of unique creative spirits.
Robert Carl is chair of composition at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. He is the author of Terry Riley’s in C (Oxford University Press).
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