What takes sixteen sticks & four hearts?
By Claudia Carlson

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Last night my friend Len, who always knows he can call me at the last moment, invited me to join him for a free percussion concert in the Winter Garden. By percussion I do not mean the construction going on at night in the pit of the World Trade Center... this was the uber talented and hip group So Percussion performing three pieces of new music. They played beads, coils of metal, flower pots, xylophones, and a variety of drums. The music was melodic, varied, enticing, and recorded live for the New Sounds Live radio program at WNYC 93.9. I loved it all, but by the last piece I was ready for it to end, percussion is not soothing, like mime or opera in subtitles, it takes extra concentration to enter their world. Funny how less makes more in art...by ignoring perspective or light source in painting or writing haiku, people take some choices away and what is left evokes all.

The talented Ms. Lisa Moore played a variety of percussive instruments and mostly the Steinway grand in the Martin Bresnick piece as images by Goya filled the stage. I did this sketch of her. But Arvo Part's Fratres for Percussion Quartet and Paul Lansky's Threads were just as wonderful, even without the pianist.

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The Art of the Possible
By Ennis Smith

“Lisa Moore, Joe’s Pub”

My first crush was on a pianist. Mildred Adams was a walking china doll whose pigtail braids draped her shoulders like a shawl. At various elementary school assemblies, sporting her delicate demeanor and rhinestone-studded princess glasses, her piano skills inspired jealousy and awe in her peers. Later in life, I realized that my “crush” was really envy – I desired not only her talent, but the accompanying life of privilege (I assumed) made such a talent possible. Grades later, another paradigm appeared in the person of the coltish Miss Barbara Doyle, she of the Joan-of-Arc haircut and knee-highs. She took great pleasure in wielding the large wooden paddle that hung next to the blackboard, and in a barrelhouse style of piano playing that suited her musical forte: show tunes.

I thought of them both as I watched Lisa Moore take the stage at Joe’s Pub. This engagement accompanied the release of Moore’s CD of music by Frederic Rzewski, titled Which Side Are You On? The first half of the program was a suite of pieces called North American Ballads. This is music to recall an idyllic summer’s day, or re-experience same as a modern elegy; listening to Rzewski’s rhapsodic, rapturous melodies might call Stephen Foster to mind, yet the composer upends that déjà vu with the use of jazz figures, unexpected repetitions and progressions.

Expectation was also challenged by what you saw. Moore is an Aussie lilt wrapped in a petite package of curly blondeness. But we are far from Weill Recital Hall; her dress communicated that she was here to work. Dressed in a white shirt and black slacks, a zebra-striped scarf of gossamer banded one of her arms, perhaps a tip off that this would not be your grandmother’s recital.

It goes without saying that holding an audience with this kind of music requires an artist possessing not only sensitivity, but also a crackerjack technique. My seat afforded a rare view of the physical nature of such an undertaking. Again and again I was struck by how aural lyricism could be contradicted by the visual explosiveness of the playing, notably during a repeated ascending passage that progressed with subtle variations, from sotto voce to pounding pianissimo. An intricate section presented an astounding visual of the pianist’s hands. As one crouched over the other with the fingers of both extended, the conjoining of Rzewski’s composition and Moore’s pianism made me think of diaphanous jellyfish. The suite’s most remarkable physical moment occurred in Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, during a run of bass chords that begin with standard fingering. As the chords broaden, so too does the use of appendages. I had to reassure myself that what I was witnessing was true: elbows out, body hugging the piano, Moore banged out the climatic chords with her forearms.

After a break, Moore re-emerges bedecked in a Pradaesque morning coat; the armband was now an ascot. The piece was De Profundis, based on excerpts from Oscar Wilde’s journal of his arrest and subsequent imprisonment for “gross indecency.” Rzewski hasn’t created a mere piano accompaniment: in addition to speaking and playing simultaneously, the musician taking on this work must master various eccentric vocal affects, singing, whistling, drumming and the playing of a car horn!

Lest you think these elements serve as gimmickry, quickly it’s revealed that their usage provides apt aural metaphors for the parlor of Wilde’s mind in this world of an artist brought low. The gift comes in the juxtaposition of the elements as abstractions play against the formal, as antiquity gets amplified by the now. The piece swings between musical pastiche particular to the era and sequences of vocal/piano or vocal/percussive syncopations.

The music works as subtext – those chaotic passages communicate the difficult moments when those “bats in the belfry” threaten to overcome Wildean rationality, making the textual account all the more moving. Rzewski sets the intelligence and the finesse of the writer like a jewel, lifting the words out of the period and hurling them into the here and now. Wilde’s observations about imprisonment, solitude and their effects on the mind takes on universality – through the symmetry of text and sound, we journey into the minds of every man and woman who ever served time.

In this piece (originally written for a man) Moore communicates a Brechtian air. Certainly no similarity exists between her and Wilde, or any man. Yet, this journey on the wheels of Wilde’s words provide as much excitement and drama as any play you’ll see this season thanks to her dulcet cadences. Again, the physicality on view enhances – towards the end of this twenty eight minute piece, Moore will slam down the lid of the piano, creating a symphony composed of finger pops, hand drumming, whispered words and chants, to recount the intricate process by which Wilde struggles to maintain his sanity, yet observe and chronicle his current reality.

Bookending the work is a line that goes something like this: “This is where the artistic life leads a man.” That statement provides a multifaceted resonance. Recounting the persecution of a writer who rejected the prudery of Victorian society echoes the recent blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks and Sean Penn, artists who refused to succumb to pro-forma patriotism. A civilized world that would condemn Wilde, yet less than one hundred years later play host to the unmistakable vision of Rzewski and the artistry of Moore, left this listener/viewer pondering the myriad fates in store when the worlds of art, inspiration and morality collide.
(June 2003)