Modern musical pyrotechnics in Rott's solo cello recital

Gus Kairupan

JAKARTA (JP): Here are some excerpts from the program notes to cellist Reynard Rott's recital of avant-garde compositions, which took place at Erasmus Huis in South Jakarta last Saturday.

First, the note regarding Giacinto Scelsi's composition called Yggur: Sound is round, but when we hear it, it seems to only have two dimensions, pitch and duration. The third dimension, depth, is there, but somehow, though we know this, it escapes us. The upper and lower (less audible) harmonics sometimes gives us the impression of a vaster, more complex sound beyond pitch and duration, but it is difficult for us to perceive its complexity.

Next is the bit about Nomos Alpha, a work by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer: The function of each pitch class is no longer audible or intelligible. And a bit further: The complete mastery of chance does not exist by chance. We think statistically without realizing it.

Therefore, we can only simulate chance and to do so, we must either be mad, or make extraordinarily complicated calculations.

There are several things that emerge from these notes which were written by the composers themselves -- the depth of sound escapes the listener, it is difficult to perceive the complexity of upper and lower harmonics (Giacinto Scelsi), and you cannot hear certain aspects regarding pitch (Iannis Xenakis).

As Rott proceeded rendering these two works, I couldn't help remembering that music would not exist if humans had no ears. As it is though, we do possess those organs, music is very much part of our lives, and those who have immersed themselves somewhat further than the ordinary listener have learned that middle C (or any note) is, to put it roughly, a collection of a lot of other notes.

Try to think of a piece of cake -- you know it's sweet because your tongue tells you it is. What you don't know (and perhaps don't care about) is to what class of carbohydrates the sweetening agent belongs. Or whether the sherry you've caught a whiff of was born from a semillon or shiraz grape that grew in the Loire Valley or on the slopes of Mount Buller, and was picked at 7 a.m. by a virgin. You don't care about that either, and are not about to split hairs about the whys and wherefores of sugar. Or is it glucose? Perhaps Tropicana (artificial sweetener)?.

But that is what Scelsi and Xenakis, musically speaking, appear to be doing: Trying to unearth all that goes into sounds, notes, harmonics and everything else that constitutes a piece of music. In putting together Yggur and Nomos Alpha, they appear to be wrestling with the problem of making audiences aware of the depth of sound, perceive the complexity of upper and lower harmonics and hear what you cannot hear, i.e. the function of pitch class.

So Scelsi and Xenakis set out to make one hear and be aware of them. Have they succeeded? Speaking for myself, I'd say only marginally. I did catch, fleetingly, some patterns in Nomos Alpha, and some sounds reminiscent of the koto.

However, not all works present were as inaccessible as the those of Scelsi and Xenakis. The references to twelve-tone music in the highly emotional For Solo Cello by Leon Kirchner (a student of Schoenberg) was quite in contrast to Yggur and Nomos Alpha. Schoenberg's influence is unmistakable, but he really only opened the door for Kirchner to pass through. And in the process, there were also the influences of other musical greats, like that of Chopin, the master of chromatics from whom subsequent composers took their cue. To me, Kirchner's work, in contrast to that of Scelsi and Xenakis, came across much more as a complete composition.

As regards Brian Ferneyhough's Time and Motion Study II, well, this is the age of virtual realities, and I still belong to those who hold that reality is either real or it isn't. Electronics, however advanced, alter sounds -- that's why I think live performances are preferable over the strains that stream out of your speakers. Certainly Ferneybough succeeds in overwhelming the audience with his work that needs four microphones, delay mechanisms that repeat patterns, all of which are quite apart of what he wants the performer to do.

What Reynard did with the cello has to be seen and heard to be believed. No wonder he, deservedly, received a standing ovation. As for me, if the event had been an exhibition of, say, paintings (I do visualize when I hear music), I'd put in a bid for Kirchner's For Solo Cello.