Casey Thomas Anderson’s recent work Apple Splitting is elegantly simple in its construction, but joyously complex in its actual being.
The score, which reads simply: yellowgreenblue, and then below: may be performed in multiples, can be interpreted as one set of material (yellow) overlapping with another, different set of material (blue), which creates a hybrid material (green). This is in fact how Casey Thomas Anderson realized the work in a performance at the wulf., as part of the Experimental Music Yearbook series earlier this month. In this performance, he presented simultaneously nine realizations of the work, which sounded together, never quite blending into a coherent sound, but rather each maintaining their own space, and simply overlapping. I was recently a guest on Ceci Moss’ Radio Heart program on East Village Radio in New York, and shared Apple Splitting. It’s streaming on the web, and you can hear it here.
John Ashbery.
Mark So also presented a performance of his work Windrows, with a simultaneous reading of the Ashbery poem on which his work was based, Litany. The poem, a long double-columned poem, was read by So and Anderson, and took an hour and a half to read. At a certain point, the large group of instrumentalists began playing, each one playing very quietly ascending tone rows, eventually ending, and leaving the reading to continue unaccompanied for a further 20 minutes. At times the work felt almost overwhelmingly beautiful—too beautiful, especially when the mechanics of the work were so transparent, and in a way arbitrary—musicians simply playing every available note, starting at the lowest and proceeding upward. And yet…
Both of these performances resonate with a statement made by the filmmaker Grahame Weinbren this weekend at the Alternative Projections symposium at USC. In describing Pat O’Neill’s films, he commented on a particular quality of his work, in which “inconsistent, incompatible, and contradictory ideas are placed side by side”. Both of these pieces seemed to embody that quality as well, and, like O’Neill’s incredible films, the work that comes out of this process is wonderful. Monday Evening Concerts’ 2010-11 season starts tonight, with a program of piano music by Ustvolskaya, Pärt, Cage and more, by Alexei Lubimov. Very much looking forward to this season…