Cultural Perspectives
By Tim Hazell, July 28, 2006


Ensembles as canons for innovation

Eighteenth-century Europe, England in particular, witnessed unprecedented prosperity and a burgeoning, educated middle class. The newly affluent attended opera houses, salons, private homes and pleasure gardens to enjoy diverse entertainments and music.

Handel dominated the venues for opera and the oratorio, but William Boyce, Joseph Gibbs, Michael Festing and others were composing chamber music for small ensembles and plush cloisters in the homes of wealthy patrons.

The Classical era and flowering of the Romantics changed the face of Western society. Europe saw revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, and the invention of the telegraph and internal combustion engine. Frederic Chopin enlarged the repertoire for solo piano, expanding the instrument’s range, as well as its impact on modern music. Franz Schubert’s personality and style exemplified the Romantic ideal.

Later Expressionist composers such as Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith took chamber music into unexplored territory and new directions. Schoenberg, evolving from his early tonal works to a later use of dissonance, insisted that this new textural development was simply a logical evolution. Modern movements in classical genres, as well as jazz, were classified using phrases similar to those appearing in critiques of visual arts and architecture by the establishment. Minimalism, for example, was characterized by the absence of adornments such as modulation, in pursuit of a stripped-down functionality. 

Urban centers such as Chicago have long been recognized for their affiliations with leaders in contemporary classics and jazz. Beat poetry during the 1950s paved the way for further experiments and interaction between authors and exponents of the avant-garde, incorporating sounds of chaos, such as breaking glass and multiple radios turned on and off at random, with ethnic tonalities such as Afro-Caribbean musical traditions. Among recent projects, Raíces y Sueños (Roots and Dreams) involved the talents of master percussionist Rubén Álavarez and poet David Hernández, a founding member of Chicago’s Latino Arts Movement. Described as “the city’s poet laureate,” Hernández uses the sounds, smells and textures of his environment, supplementing 30 years of experience as a writer with his collaboration in music ensembles. Rhythms and tonal clusters affect the shaping and organization of Hernández’s verse, as in “The Butterfly Effect,” where chains of associations freely move from one image to another. The effects, forming links of hallucination, resemble the conflict and resolution of themes navigating without fixed key centers.
 
If a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing
could cause a hurricane off the coast of Florida,
so could a deck of cards shuffled at a picnic.
So could the clapping hands of a father
watching his son rounding the bases,
the wind sculpting his baggy pants.
So could a woman reading a book of poems,
a tiny current from a turned page
slipping out the open window, nudging
a passing breeze: an insignificant event
that could snowball months later into a monsoon
at a coastal village halfway around the world.
Palm trees bowing on the shore.
Grass huts disintegrating like blown dandelions.

Trios, quartets and ensembles provide the perfect medium for expressive sonic palettes. This makes them ideal catalysts for new continuities and innovations. Many of today’s composers have grown up and participated in electronic experiences, encounters that are often subverted as part of the learning processes inherent with academic training, surfacing later on as methods to explore the fringes of a banquet of temperament, setting the pace for invention. Compact size and close proximity with the audience bring eye contact and ensemble body language nearer to enthusiasts of the small concert stage. There are moments of diminuendo as silence is shaped, or when a crescendo is imminent, when one feels the sonority of strings, the dynamics of pizzicato and glissandi churning under the floorboards at one’s feet. 

An intimate concert of great ensemble playing elicits chemistry that can only come from the synthesis of performer and spectator. Groups such as the La Catrina Quartet, at St. Paul’s Church as part of the San Miguel el Grande Pro Musica series last weekend, are able to transform scores into gestural sweeps of emotive power, laced with subtle shades of humor, pathos and irony. Artists of stature are much more than the products of universities and conservatories. When inspired, they transform the works of avant-garde and traditional composers into catalysts for things we can remember of the past, present and future. During La Catrina’s performances of Anton Webern, Thomas Janson and Mozart, soundscapes gathered and pooled, private topographies that captured and suspended harmony, scent and sight. Audience and musicians were set adrift in pursuit of private gardens of darkness and luminescence, minding each other well, almost understanding.


Tim Hazell is a multidisciplinary artist in the areas of painting, music, theater, education, writing and research, specializing in Latin America. He may be contacted at hazel@unisono.net.mx or at his website, www.timhazell.com.