| HOME |
|
tled “Messieurs les enfants”, tell the magic
and burlesque story of a metamorphosis. A schoolteacher assigns
a bizarre essay topic: ´You wake up one morning and you notice that,
in the night, you have changed into an adult. Absolutely panic-stricken,
you rush into your parents’ bedroom. They have been changed
into children. Say what happens next.ª Doing their homework, three
children soon discover that the fiction is no longer hypothetical.
Their parents have mysteriously become children. The children themselves
are now grown-ups, suddenly forced to find their way into the adult
world while keeping a child’s eye on what surrounds them, happiness
and absurdity, pain and death. The music of Carson
Kievman is the music of a “monsieur l’enfant”.
Not music for childhood, neither Kinderszenen nor Children’s
Corner, but music from childhood, as only children catapulted into
adulthood can conceive and only adults who have not forgotten can
sustain. Love for the extremes, fascination with nature, playful
theatricality are three recurrent features in Kievman’s opus.
His music can be disordered, chaotic, and messy. It can be irresistible,
moving, and sublime. It can be both sophisticated and naive, incomprehensible
and transparent, frustrating and exciting. Worse, the bits that
first sound like one thing become the opposite thing after repeated
listening, and vice versa. The proof is in the pudding.
One may tempted to apply to Kievman’s music the label of “poly-stylism”,
a term usually reserved for the complex mixtures of old and new,
meta-Baroque and post-serial elements typically found in the compositions
of Alfred Schnittke. But this does not seem fitting. If one needs
an (ugly) neologism to describe the essence of Kievman’s music,
this can only be “strato-stylistic” (I said it was ugly).
Like radicchio or archeology, the music of Kievman is about layers
on layers on layers. On the surface, and only the surface, Kievman
seems to accept traditional structures and conventions – after
all, he is still writing full-fledged symphonies in the twenty-first
century. Digging a bit, a web of formal extensions and experiments
reveals his very personal approach to what classical form is supposed
to mean (a good example on this compact disc is a piece originally
titled Sonata No.1 (42), and now split into three separate compositions,
an intro-duction or intro-dictus, a toccata(da) and a meditation!).
Dig more, and the influences – implicit or explicit —
of modern masters emerge (Messiaen’s “Regards”, Nancarrow’s
“Studies”, Cage’s work for prepared piano, Schoenberg’s
“Klavierst¸cke”, with sprinkles of Ives and Harry Partch).
Dig further and vague traces of the Romantics appear, let alone
Bach and Couperin… Even smart critics are on record as confusing
“the cyclonic order of childhood” (Pennac, once again)
at the root of Kievman’s music with shapelessness. But once
the Ariadne’s thread to his music is found, the sense of stylistic
disorientation is permanently replaced by admiring bewilderment
for the continuous flow of its invention.
This compact disc presents the integral (so far) of Kievman’s
music for solo piano. The first composition, Introdictus, was written
for David Arden in 1992 and revised in 1998. It is a free-form prelude,
whose continuous flow of arpeggiations are reminiscent of the style
brisÈ of early French harpsichordists, updated after Debussy’s
“Images” and Ravel’s “Tombeau” and refined
in light of Messiaen. At the end of the piece is the Japanese-sounding
inscription “Rubato Abligato Mishimoto Bonsaii Davidsan”,
which is as translatable as a line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Toccatada (1991, rev.1998) is what it promises to be, an almost
dadaistic toccata to be played “as fast as possible,”
in the spirit of Nancarrow playing Prokofiev playing Bach. The entire
piece sounds as an easy-going celebration of fun and speed. The
mid-section of Toccatada interrupts the symmetry of this moto perpetuo
in 5/8 by introducing three peculiar bars in 6/8. Once again there
is an inscription at the end of the score, this time in pig-Italian:
“Alla Molovia Spiccatino Viverace Ardini”. The third piece,
Meditation, was composed in 1992 and completed in 1998 (when combined
with the previous two works, these three compositions might still
be performed as a modern “Sonata”). At more than 24 minutes,
Meditation is the longest of the compositions on this disc. The
title notwithstanding, no ghost of Massenet is invoked here. And
the fact that, in the first half of the piece, a number of “sound
effects” – thunderstorms, raindrops, cicadas – gently
reverberate echoing and integrating the sounds of the piano, should
not be misinterpreted as an exotic surrender to new age temptations.
Meditation is no consolatory lobster bisque for the soul. If anything,
its soundscape is as lunar and Limbo-like as anything Kievman has
ever written, the musical equivalent of Tarkovsky’s zone in
“Stalker”. In the first part of the piece, chords in fortissimo
and pianissimo keep alternating, recalling Mussorgsky’s “Catacombae”
from “Pictures at an Exhibition”. Like the choir in a
Greek tragedy, the sound effects comment discreetly on the “events”
emanating from the piano. The entire section can be thought of as
a descent to Hades in slow motion (“if you think that you are
playing too slow – says the score – than slow down even
more!”), or a journey from the exterior dimensions of natural
forces and influences into the interior dimensions of psyche and
monologue — a theme that emerges over and over in recent works
by Kievman, most explicitly in his hurricane Symphony. In the second
section, choir bells join the piano in an obsessive iteration of
the interval E-C sharp, suggesting chimes heard from a distance.
Memories of actual childhood blend here with echoes of musical fragments.
To find a comparable musical experience, one has perhaps to go back
to Schoenberg’s Klavierst¸ck Op.11 No. 2, or Chopin’s
second Prelude. The somber chords of the first part return at the
end, their extreme dynamic swings now softened within a quieter
range. The final inscription is “Achtung langsam aber zie kinder
nicht heir mein friend”.
Harpo (1986) can be described as a sort of Fantaisie-Impromptu.
In its serene lyricism and amiable humor, it is possibly the most
approachable piece of this collection. In fact, this work was created
as a warm-up composition exercise after a 3-year period when Kievman
stopped composing. The flourished passages of the right hand and
the basso-ostinato patterns of the left hand make the piece similar
in spirit to a set of “variations upon a ground” of the
Elizabethan Renaissance. At the same time (talking about stylistic
layers in Kievman), Harpo can also remind one of a relaxed improvisation,
somewhere between Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Such interpretation
is implicitly sanctioned by the composer himself who asks for the
tempo to be “slightly flexible within the meter”, substantially
authorizing a rubato close enough to unobtrusive swing. Nuts &
Bolts was composed between 1992 and 1995. Both this piece and the
contemporaneous Symphony No. 3 (“hurricane”) were written
— as noted in the score — “as a response to having
lived through, and been devastated by, one of the most extensive
natural disasters of our time — the South Florida Hurricane
of 1992”. At the heart of these Sturm-und-Drang compositions
is the interplay between external forces and interior feelings,
between actuality and imagery, catastrophe and trauma. The Symphony
describes the hypnotic anticipation of the hurricane, the panicked
excitement during its unleashing, and the resigned surrender to
the beauty of natural forces as manifestations of an irresistible
destiny. Similarly, the coexistence of dramatic, contemplative,
and descriptive elements lies at the core of Nuts & Bolts, which
represents a sort of chiaroscuro study vis-ý-vis the timbric and
textural fresco of the Symphony. After a brief introduction, tension
builds up in long stretches of crescendo, only to burst suddenly
and to restart again and again (a procedure somewhat reminiscent
of the waves of “fuerza y luz” in the work by Luigi Nono,
friend and mentor of Kievman). Toccata-like passages for the two
hands seem to rotate in whirls around a point of static calm, an
“eye of the storm” implied by the music but never explicitly
admitted or represented. At the micro-structural level, a ternary
rhythmic pattern recurs obsessively throughout the score. The meaning
of the triplet as a constructive and expressive device is clarified
at the very end of the composition, where the acceptance of natural
devastation as a manifestation of fate is hinted at by the quotation
of the “Destiny” motto from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,
the motif formed precisely by three repeated notes and a falling
third. Nuts & Bolts concludes with a mysterious sequence of
triplets in diminuendo for the left hand, oscillating between F-sharp
and F and slowly extinguishing into silence. The last composition
is the oldest in this collection (written in 1976–77 as a duo,
The Temporary Piano and The Tentative Extended Piano, the composition
is dedicated to David Arden). Title and musical content gently mock
both the German Baroque of Bach’s “Wohltemperirte Klavier”
and the New York Minimalism of La Monte Young’s
“Well-Tuned Piano.” Kievman’s gusto for theatrical
gestures is emphasized in this piece, whose staging options range
from a simple concert performance to an elaborate technical production
in which the “Pianist” is assisted by a page-turner “Butler”
and a bunch of “Servants” including another “Butler”,
a “Maid”, a “Chauffeur”, a “Press Secretary”
and his (her) “Personal Secretary”! In the theatrical
version, the pianist sits on a platform with springs, surrounded
by choir and cow bells (see diagram). Vocalizing, bell-playing and
body-shaking, all concur to build up action. At the climax, the
pianist, exhausted, collapses into the piano. Reviewing the premiere
of The Temporary & Tentative Extended Piano and other pieces,
Leighton Kerner of The Village Voice wrote: “As a builder of
music-theater constructions, Kievman is a wizard!… Kievman
and his musicians conspire to reveal a theater where music is not
content to accompany speaking, singing, or dancing, and is not inclined,
no matter how entertainingly, to imitate non-musical components,
but takes over, instrumentally pure, tolerating no accomplice-arts.
To the extent that Kievman’s present work achieves this, it
is stunning!” —Paolo Pesenti, 2000 |
