For Hal

Youth
Is no excuse for such things
Respon­si­bil­i­ties
Weigh like straw­ber­ries
On a short­cake.
Go
To the root of the mat­ter
Get laid
Have a friend
Do any­thing
But be a free fuck­ing agent.
No one
Has lots of them
Lays or friends or any­thing
That can make a lit­tle light in all that dark­ness.
There is a cig­a­rette you can hold for a minute
In your weak mouth
And then the light goes out,
Rival, honey, friend,
And then you stub it out.

- Jack Spicer, from Admo­ni­tions

If you can do it, do it. If they don’t want you to do it, do it. If they don’t help you do it, do it. Do it your­self. That’s the most impor­tant les­son an artist must learn, usu­ally the hard way. At places likes music schools and con­ser­va­to­ries, they teach you tech­nique, give you valu­able oppor­tu­ni­ties to com­pose, rehearse and per­form, but they never bother to tell you how to make your way in the world as a musi­cian and com­poser. You have to do that your­self. You have to be a free fuck­ing agent.

And why not start when you’re young, when it’s time to get laid, get drunk. A group of young com­posers and musi­cians, Exis­ten­tial Pilot, is doing an admirable job of DIY, and they gave a recital last week at the WMP Con­cert Hall in Man­hat­tan. This is a group of per­form­ing com­posers, and they played the works of three of them, Ezra Don­ner, Johnathan Lubin and William Zuck­er­man. Shows like this are by nature a mixed bag, and in this case a mixed bag of young men fig­ur­ing out what they are doing. This is the time to make the best kind of mis­takes, and these com­posers are mak­ing theirs, and that’s valu­able. They are also mak­ing a lot of good, lively and inter­est­ing music.

Every com­poser belongs to the cul­ture of their time and place, so it’s a nat­ural that Zuckerman’s open­ing Cal­z­on­cillo Gnomo is his homage to South Park. It’s a pithy piece full of rhyth­mic force and a few lyri­cal touches, with the inter­est­ing mix of lega­cies from both Vince Guaraldi and Ligeti’s Etudes. Lubin played this demand­ing piece with knife-edge con­cen­tra­tion. It was an engag­ing start.

Lubin’s own This is the Gar­den fol­lowed, and was less suc­cess­ful. It’s a song, set­ting the e.e. cum­mings poem, but not in a way that clearly appre­hends the sub­stance of the words. The poem is a death-haunted pas­torale, the music is in the style of the Amer­i­can song­book, and they don’t quite go together. Lubin’s melody is lovely and could be made to work, but the har­monic struc­ture does not do jus­tice to the mean­ing of the text which demands the type of shad­ing a Sond­heim can give in this con­text; less reg­u­lar­ity in shape and sound and more unset­tled har­monies and phrases. Ezra Don­ner set Wal­lace Stevens’ Thir­teen Ways of Look­ing at a Black­bird, a daunt­ing chal­lenge with bet­ter results. Stevens is dif­fi­cult to under­stand, and Don­ner made the inter­est­ing choice of empha­siz­ing vari­a­tion over inter­pre­ta­tion, chang­ing the accom­pa­ni­ment of the voice fre­quently, keep­ing the ear inter­ested. The music was fre­quently lively, a good les­son that the art song doesn’t have to be lugubri­ous, and also witty and con­sci­en­tious in sup­port of the fine singing from Claire DiVizio. There were a few moments that recalled the won­der­ful Her­mit Songs of Samuel Bar­ber, appro­pri­ate both in that this is that composer’s cen­te­nary and that his work offers real guid­ance in how to write good Amer­i­can art songs.

There was some elec­tron­ics, and they were prob­lem­atic. Pure elec­tronic play­back in a con­cert set­ting, with an audi­ence lis­ten­ing and star­ing at an empty and inert stage, just doesn’t work, and it never has. Even audi­ences that know they are get­ting some­thing pre­re­corded need some­thing to look at, this is why I think Tim Hecker tends to stand fid­dling, prob­a­bly super­flu­ously, at a mixer dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion of his work. That was a prob­lem here for Lubin’s Trans­for­ma­tions, a short elec­tronic piece played back straight, and ‘God in the Machine,’ the first of three excerpts from Zuckerman’s ongo­ing Music In Plu­ral­ism. Also, the elec­tronic palettes used by the com­posers were dull, and in music that demands non-acoustic processes and non-notated struc­tures, noth­ing out of the ordi­nary hap­pened. These pieces were brief, though, and a small part of the con­cert. The other excerpts from Zuckerman’s piece, scored for piano and violin-piano duo, worked as intrigu­ing epi­grams. Out­side of their larger struc­ture there was not enough con­text to judge them thor­oughly, but they had the aspect of pre­ludes and post­scripts, music describ­ing an expe­ri­ence once-removed, which is an entic­ing idea.

Lubin and Zuckerman’s most suc­cess­ful works were, respec­tively, the former’s Moods for Piano from 2006 and the latter’s Sin­u­ous Rills from 2008. Moods is in the elu­sive and attrac­tive classical/cabaret style that William Bol­colm is so good at. The four move­ments, ‘Procla­ma­tion,’ ‘Inverted toc­cata,’ ‘Night Club’ and ‘Rag­time’ express their titles in music, have their say and take a bow. The ‘toc­cata’ was a lit­tle unformed, but ‘Night Club’ made witty use of what is usu­ally clichéd mate­r­ial, and there’s always a need for new rags. Rills is a trio for piano, played by Don­ner, vio­lin (Zoë Acqua) and clar­inet (Mark Dover). It fol­lows an abstract path of water from ‘Water­fall’ through ‘Flow’ and ‘Dams’ before emp­ty­ing into ‘Basin.’ The music is appro­pri­ately fluid and lyri­cal, with a gen­tle, slightly melan­choly tone and real emo­tional heft. It’s open spaces and sub­tle inven­tive­ness recall Cop­land, and it is straight­for­ward and pithy. The extremely sub­dued end­ing is very effec­tive in its sense of both con­trol of the mate­ri­als and in the ques­tions it seems to ask.

In all these works, though, there was an over­all sense that there were chances still left to take, more to be dared, a greater desire to do the unex­pected, the thing that the com­poser him­self was not con­sid­er­ing. The ques­tion of rel­a­tive aes­thetic safety and a will­ing­ness to fail is one that every worth­while artist has to con­sider, espe­cially because it’s hard and scary. The stand­out pieces on the pro­gram were two works by Don­ner that showed an inter­est in push­ing that edge out a lit­tle. His Sonata No. 1 for Piano and Sonata Judaica for clar­inet and piano per­formed the vital action of set­ting their own premises and then attack­ing them a lit­tle bit. The duo was ener­getic and good humored, incor­po­rat­ing the fla­vor of Jew­ish melodies into Mod­ernist struc­tures with just enough touches of pop­u­lar cul­ture and crazi­ness to also try and break out of them. It offered an under­stand­ing of the gestalt idea of music that Meyer Kupfer­man expressed so well, a very open-hearted and human approach to music mak­ing. The piano sonata, played by Don­ner, was an excit­ing, impres­sive work. He uses frag­men­ta­tion as a struc­tural tech­nique in the first move­ment, toss­ing off inter­est­ing, jazzy and often intensely ener­getic phrases, aban­don­ing them and bring­ing them back just at the moment one thinks he’s for­got­ten about them. It seems ran­dom but is actu­ally con­tin­u­ous. The mate­r­ial is dense but the writ­ing is always clear, even in the inner voices. The remain­ing move­ments go for effect, the mid­dle one lulling and the finale agi­tated, and they work all the way to the big end­ing. If any­thing the piece could be longer with more music, the struc­tural method of the first move­ment is so inter­est­ing that it could be applied in a more extended manner.

It was a promis­ing and intrigu­ing start for this young group, and if they are pro­claim­ing their exis­tence through the action of mak­ing music, then I hope they will con­tinue to pro­claim and expand. Stub it out, light another, get laid, but be a free fuck­ing agent.