MEL POWELL
Six Recent Works
Track 1
Die Violine (1987)
A Pierrot Lunaire setting for Soprano, Piano, and Violin
Judith Bettina, soprano; Mel Powell, piano; Yoko Matsuda, violin
Track 2
Madrigal for Flute Alone (1988)
Rachel Rudich, flute
Track 3
Strand Settings: "Darker" (1983)
A song cycle for voice with electronic-music accompaniment
Judith Bettina, soprano
Track 4
String Quartet (1982)
The Sequoia String Quartet
Yoko Matsuda and Miwako Watanabe, violins
James Dunham, viola; Robert Martin, cello
Track 5
Computer Prelude (1988)
Track 6
Nocturne for Violin Solo ( 1969; rev. 1985)
Yoko Matsuda, violin
Die Violine (1987)
THE VIOLIN
(Translation by C.E.
Cooper)
The violin's delicate soul lilting with silent harmonies dreams in the open cabinet excitement's trembling afterglow. Who would dare stir from such repose anew, with mighty arm of pain, the violin's delicate soul lilting with silent harmonies? A slender timid ray of moonlight flirting ironically with pain's sweet torment-rouses and entices gently, with silverlighted bow, the violin's delicate soul.
Mel Powell has written: "Only in response to the striking idea proposed by Leonard Stein would I have ever considered setting a German text (for the first and no doubt the last time) and, moreover, setting it rather speedily. So it is friend Leonard who is responsible for this present addition to my collection of ‘'Overnight Pieces." Although I am pleased to be named the instigator of this remarkable piece, I acknowledge readily that Mel is as comfortable and exacting with the language of this text as any native German. (I think he may have effectively composed his Haiku Settings
in their original tongue as in an English translation, and am almost sorry he did not do so because the music captures the essence of the original Japanese poetry in all its delicacy.) But even more, I am delighted that Mel accepted the commission (thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arnold Schoenberg Institute) to compose a setting of one of the 29 "other" poems of Pierrot Lunaire not used by Schoenberg in his epochal composition of 1912. (Schoenberg set 21 of the 50 poems of Albert Giraud's Pierrot collection in their German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben.) Mel was joined in this project, conceived as paying homage to the 75-year-old Pierrot Lunaire of Schoenberg, by other distinguished American composers -Milton Babbitt, John Harbison, Richard Hoffman, Karl Kohn, and William Kraft -- who were requested to write for the same ensemble as Schoenberg's, or for parts thereof: violin/viola, cello, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, piano, and voice.
Mel was immediately taken with the moonstruck atmosphere of the poem (no. 32 in the collection), and chose a most appropriate setting for the text with the violin as centerpiece, particularly as he had in mind as performers his dear friends Yoko Matsuda and Judith Bettina, for whom he had written several other pieces. (He did not have himself in mind as pianist. Happily, though, he was
persuaded to join the others for this recording -- the first time he has entered a recording studio as a performer in more than 30 years!)
Mel's own description, first published in the Schoenberg Institute program booklet on the occasion of the world premiere, provides us with all the necessary insight to know and enjoy this miniature masterpiece:
The unaccompanied voice sings the first two lines of the poem up to the last syllables of 'Harmonien,' at which point the piano enters -the initial instance (and the only one I need cite here) of more or less flagrant wordpainting in the little piece. The violin (with its manifestly zarte Seele all but unaccompanied) comes to the fore briefly between the first and second stanzas; a somewhat different interlude (this with the piano engaged) links the second and third. Although among the handful of piano figurations a few are, say, not inadvertently 'familial' with respect to those of the real Pierrot Lunaire, they tend to project harmony rather than taut line. And it is only for a fleeting, hardly perceptible moment that an honest-togoodness quotation is involved. But even that, assigned to the piano as the third stanza begins, steals directly not from Schoenberg's piano music, but rather from the first five notes played by the clarinet as the
incipient of the canon in no. 18 (Die Mondfleck). Given the matching images between that text and this one, some such reference was scarcely to be resisted. It is also only at this point in Die Violine -- that is, for the first few lines of the final stanza -- that a form of sprechstimme is called for.
Leonard Stein
Track 2
Madrigal for Flute Alone (1988)
"The culture of particular form has ended; the age of determined relationships has begun." Powell is fond of quoting Mondrian's famous remark, a remark which is in many ways reflected by the structural nuances shaping this lovely solo piece.
Here a fundamental antithesis is defined at once by means of register: (1) an item circumscribed within an octave, and (2) its alternate form, employing the instrument's full range. Precisely this determined relationship forms the narrative of the work.
Characteristically, Powell translates these complements into other dimensions. There is, for instance, a constant fluctuation of phrase lengths serving as linear analog of the registral expansion and contraction. Or, invoking other criteria in behalf of a different metaphor, there is the readily perceived oscillation between formal units displaying frequent iterations of comparatively few pitches and those involving
no pitch repetitions at all. And the free-flowing aspect of the rhythmic structure -- an eloquent example of what Powell has spoken of as pacing without pulsing -- derives from a similar interaction of groups opposing one another with regard to perceived tempo (a consequence of their prime-related durational values). It is just such perpetual variance -- the manifold translations and reinterpretations -that projects a fixed "determined relationship" rather than a fixed "particular" utterance. If from the compositional point of view the piece accordingly proposes an elaborate associational maze, from any point of view it offers the listener a beautiful musical substance.
Peter Zaferes
Track 3
Strand Settings: "Darker" (1983)
I.The Dance
The ghost of another comes to visit and we hold communion while the light shines. While the light shines, what else can we do? And who doesn't have one foot in the grave?
And which one of us is not being pulled down constantly?
My mind floats in the purple air of my skull. I see myself dancing. I smile at everybody. Slowly I dance out of the burning house of my head.
And who isn't borne again and again into heaven?
II.The One Song
I prefer to sit all day like a sack in a chair and to lie all night like a stone in my bed.
When food comes I open my mouth. When sleep comes I close my eyes.
My body sings only one song; the wind turns gray in my arms.
I notice how the trees seem shaggy with leaves and the steam of insects engulfs them. The light falls like an anchor through the branches.
Flowers bloom. Flowers die More is less. I long for more.
III. Letter
Men are running across a field, pens fall from their pockets. People out walking will pick them up. It is one of the ways letters are written.
How things fall to others!
The self no longer belonging to me, but asleep in a stranger's shadow, now clothing the stranger, now leading him off.
It is noon as I write you. Someone's life has come into my hands. The sun whitens the buildings. It is all I have. I give it all to you. Yours,
IV. Tomorrow
Your best friend is gone, your other friend, too. Now the dream that used to turn in your sleep, like a diamond, sails into the year's coldest night.
What did you say?
Or was it something you did? It makes no difference -- the house of breath collapsing around your voice, your voice burning, are nothing to worry about.
Tomorrow your friends will come back; your moist open mouth will bloom in the glass of storefronts.
Yes. Yes. Tomorrow they will come back and you will invent an ending that comes out right.
V. From a Litany
Let the shark keep to the shelves and closets of coral.
Let cats throw over their wisdom
Let the noble horse who rocks under the outlaw's ass eat plastic turf.
For no creature is safe.
Let the flag flutter in the glass moon of each eye.
Let the black-suited priests stand for the good life.
Let them tell us to be more like them. For that is the nature of the sickness.
Let the bleak faces of the police swell like yeast.
Let breezes run like sauce over their skins. For the kingdom is theirs.
Let the wind devise secrets and leave them in trees.
Let the earth suck at roots and discover the emblems of weather.
VI. Seven Poems
At the edge of the body's night ten moons are rising.
When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence. My body lies down and I hear my own voice lying next to me.
I have a key so I open the door and walk in. It is dark and I walk in. It is darker and I walk in.
VOICE ON TAPE:
Let the great sow of state grow strong. Let those in office search under their clothes for the private life. They will find nothing. Let them gather together and hold hands. They shall have nothing to hold.
Let the bodies of debutantes gleam like frigidaires. For they shall have sex with food. Let flies sink into their mother's thighs and go blind in the trenches of meat. Let the patient unmask the doctor and swim in the gray milk of his mind. For nothing will keep.
Let a violet cloak fall on the bleached hair of the poetess
Let the twilight cover the lost bone of her passion.
For her moon is ambition.
Let the dusty air release its sugars.
Let candy the color of marlin flesh build up on the tables.
For everyone's mouth is open.
VOICE ON TAPE:
A scar remembers the wound. The wound remembers the pain. Once more you are crying.
The rock is pleasure and it opens and we enter it as we enter ourselves each night.
When I talk to the window I say everything is everything.
Text by Mark Strand from the collection of Poems, Darker (New York, Atheneum, 1970.)
Copyright 1968, 1969, 1970 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Atheneum Publishers.
Mel Powell's mode of writing for the voice here aligns the composer with the great bel canto tradition and its ideals of vocal beauty. Along
with Powell's tendency to avoid overly dramatic and noisily romanticized expression, this leads him to choose texts from poets such as Mark Strand. Strand's poetry shuns proclamatory drama. The collection entitled Darker is especially rich in images that fluctuate constantly between the interior world of "self" and the external world. All action is covert, lying deep beneath the surface. This conforms precisely with Powell's image of the essence of lyric poetry, which he once defined as the resonance of quiet obsessions. Perhaps there is an indication of Powell's feeling for these particular texts in the fact that, while melismatic treatment is a feature of most of his other vocal works here the setting is largely syllabic. And the degree to which word and tone are correlated in this composition is suggested by Mark Strand's own comments: I wish to say how much Mel Powell's settings of some of the poems in Darker have meant to me. They are exquisite, of course, and way beyond what anyone else has done with my work, but more than that, when I listen to them I reexperience my poems in a way that is actually pleasurable. They seem to have more life; they seem enhanced, not merely complemented; and they seem clear, free of any distortion. In Powell's settings, the poems have about them a kind of magical fullness, the result, I am sure, of a profound sympathy and understanding.
One needs only to look peripherally at Strand Settings: "Darker" to find a plethora of subtle inventions fusing poetic and musical utterances into inseparable unions. To choose a pair of readily available examples from the second piece, "The One Song": Powell masterfully assigns to the voice two and only two pitches to portray the enervated ambiance of the entire first stanza. And later in the same song, "flowers bloom" at the highest pitch of the piece, then "flowers die" at the song's lowest pitch.
Far less evident than word-painting is the subtle -- indeed radical -- innovation Powell devised to provide sufficient freedom for the human performer so that a confidently expressive rubato becomes possible between real-time voice and prerecorded electronic accompaniment. (The process involves Powell's pitchtableau method and its organization of harmonic constructs, but to describe the technical rules of combination would exceed present purposes.) The result is that the tape assumes the supportive role of a sensitive accompanist, seeming to "breathe" with the soprano. This in itself ensures the work's unique place in the literature. A further, equally compelling singularity is worth remarking: Among the notable compositions created tor voice and electronics, Strand Settings: "Darker" is very likely the only actual song cycle known to the medium.
The work was commissioned by the Eastman School of Music tor Jan deGaetani, who presented both its American and European premieres, and whose (prerecorded) voice is heard in polyphonic interaction with Ms. Bettina during the closing few minutes.
Peter Zaferes
Track 4
String Quartet (1982)
Here is a brilliant example of Mel Powell's meticulous compositional craftsmanship and his singular skill at assembling complex musical structures that are at the same time richly expressive. In the present instance, the eloquent results are obtained by maintaining a judicious balance between multi-dimensional constructs, including varied 12-tone aggregates and other "scrambled" 12-note pitch sets -- intricate techniques that have defeated other, less inventive practitioners of the post-serial idiom, but which remain ripe with creative possibilities for Powell.
The composer once described this Quartet as "an instance of modular composition." As one who has labored at great length to dismantle the work analytically, measure by measure and module by module, I can attest to the validity of that simple statement. But I must add that the degree to which it is true in the present case is overwhelming.
Three major sections of the single-movement work are clearly articulated, hence readily perceived. But the composition as a whole is more precisely defined by the gradual global and local reduction in multiplicity. The "gnarled kaleidoscopic confusion" of the opening finally gives way near the end to the "unisonous assertions" (as Powell describes this trajectory). To be sure, the most conspicuous of the individual musical characteristics transformed in this way is indeed texture, in the reduction of density levels. But there Is much, much more in the work's details. And it is there, to paraphrase Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, that one finds perfection. Each of the unique pitch sets is constantly varied in its partitioning and provides the musical raw materials which are rotated among the four players. These units are carefully particularized by exacting articulations, dynamics, complementary temporal structures, and diversified melodic contours. Each is thus granted the uniqueness implicit in Powell's definition of form as "perceived differentiation."
In sum, the Quartet reveals itself as it unfolds, rather than through a series of "expository utterances": governing its compact 11-minute duration is the dynamic "theme" of gradual multi-dimensional attenuation. The composition gives us Powell constructing and inventing simultaneously, triumphantly, on
every musical level, addressing multiplicity as a primary principal of organization in the structure of an intense original musical design.
Mark Waldrep
Track 5
Computer Prelude (1988)
A "child of exasperation," Powell calls it. This is because the piece came to light first in quite different form: as a section of a work for two pianos. "After the composition was completed," Powell explains, I began to assess various relevant practical questions. How refractory were the individual and ensemble burdens here? How many months -- years? -of rehearsal would be necessary in order for the players, however conscientious and wellintentioned they might be to achieve reasonably accurate coordination? demands And so on. To my dismay, a stubborn inner censor kept asserting, more and more forcefully, that demands on the performers in this section of the composition were outrageous, entirely excessive. So, alas at the end I decided that it had to be abandoned. But evidently Powell was still reluctant to part with the material. Rather than banish it to the file cabinet (where perhaps many such entities rest in peace), he called on a "performer" uniquely impervious to difficulties such as beset mortal executants: the computer. The envisioned complexities of temporal struc
turing were thus "facilitated."
Powell now describes the Computer Prelude as a "stretto without exposition." While its assertion of harmony is by no means a secondary feature, the work's overall polyphonic bias is self-evident. The surface of the music is continually undergoing change. No event, small or large, is in fact repeated at any point. And yet, given the consistency of registral saturation, of the harmonic-friction level, and of the aperiodicity of attack patterns, a seamlessness, a kind of "continuum" results – paradoxically -- from perpetual variance. As Powell has written in regard to other works of his: "This interplay of subterranean sameness on the one hand and, on the other, continual change at the music's surface yields much of the perceptual" ambiguity that has been known to energize the 'egalitarian, steady-state' languages of nontonality.”
Peter Zaferes
Track 6
Nocturne for Violin Solo ( 1969; rev. 1985)
The loneliness of the unaccompanied violin is underscored by the extremely introverted nature of this lovely monologue. In a sequence of moment-to-moment shifts, a whisper, a meditation, an intense cry, it bespeaks the nocturnal, true to the title, seeming to reflect dreams rather than declamations.
The opposite of a glittering showpiece, this work keeps even its severer hidden, the "virtuosity" submerged, so to speak. The stark effect of the whole results from the way a thought here is picked up there -- as continual rumination rather than development; proposing puzzles, but not puzzles to be unraveled. External worlds, ordinary rules of order in an ordinary usage of time seem distant from this intensely personal zone.
Powell once wrote of the work that its "structural underpinnings derive directly from, and present a modest extension of, the idea of registral invariance introduced by Webern more out the than a half-century ago.
Ms. Matsuda has frequently performed this Nocturne in concerts throughout the United States as in Europe and Japan.
R.G. Naldec
