Santa Fe New Music Presents "The Colors of Music" featuring Margaret Lancaster

Electro-acoustic works from leading international composers, and a four-hour masterwork by Morton Feldman bookend a SFNM mini-festival, “The Colors of Music.”

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Program: Toneland Security (January 17)

The January 17 concert, “Toneland Security” gets its moniker from the title of one of the pieces, by Canadian composer Paul Steenhuisen. The program features works from some of the leading young composers on the international scene, most of which were commissioned by Lancaster herself. “Margaret’s devotion to new music, theatrical prowess, and capacity for multimedia performance arts are things we really respect,” says SFNM Artistic Director John Kennedy.

Long-time SFNM followers will remember she performed in some of SFNM’s very first concerts in 2001 and 2002. For four years she has been acting and playing flute in the Obie-winning Mabou Mines production Dollhouse, and touring the piece worldwide. “Composers today are influenced by music from around the world, and the works programmed on this concert include Indonesian influences, refrains from popular music and TV, hints of African music, and club music. Several of the works include electronic computer playback or theatrical components.”

The concert takes place at Charlotte Jackson Project Space, a beautiful, flexible-configuration gallery/workspace opened this past summer in the emerging art nexus off Airport Road. Tickets are $20 and are available at Nicholas Potter Booksellers and at the door. Seating is limited, so advance purchase is suggested.

Program: For Philip Guston (January 19)

SITE Santa Fe is the venue for the regional premiere of a truly  monumental piece in the repertoire, For Philip Guston, by 20th century composer, Morton Feldman in 1984. Flutist Margaret Lancaster will be joined by SFNM Ensemble members David Tolen, percussion, and Deborah Wagner, piano.

Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, associated with many of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. Guston was a factor in ushering in painting’s Post Modernist movement, and was also a longtime and dear friend of Morton Feldman.

“Feldman’s music is regarded as some of the most important American music of the late 20th century,” explains John Kennedy. However, he had a very close association with visual artists too, and his work is often considered a sibling of sorts, an aural articulation of the work of people like Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Guston.

Kennedy explains that Feldman was a composer who thought like a painter. “He considered music’s surface, texture, and color,” Kennedy says. In fact, Feldman had many thoughts about the role of composers and painters. He once wrote:

“Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer’s vested interest in his craft. Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians. The painter achieves mastery by allowing what he is doing to be itself. In a way, he must step aside in order to be in control. The composer is just learning to do this. He is just beginning to learn that controls can be thought of as nothing more than accepted practice.” (Morton Feldman, Essays, Kerpen, 1985.)

 

This concert is of considerable interest for Santa Fe, where visual artists are so prominent. It is, however, not construed as a “visual arts meet music” event, but rather an attempt by SFNM to move music out of the concert hall and into alternate performance environments.

Musically, audiences should know that like all of Feldman’s late works, For Philip Guston involves “mosaic-like musical motives, which are very slowly and subtly changed and transformed,” Kennedy adds. “The music is quiet, with its own psychological and emotional plane.”

This concert is presented in a come-and-go format, meaning audience members are free to get up from their seats and visit the galleries—or leave SITE altogether and return. This is in keeping with Feldman’s own description of the piece, as he wrote in 1985: "As I say, the piece is long. Don't feel that you're a captive audience, and don't be embarrassed if you have to leave. A lot of good friends might have to pick up a daughter from a birthday party. Other friends who are here have to pick up someone from the airport...so it's perfectly OK to leave."

(Concert-goers at SITE will take note that January 19 is the last day of “The Disappeared/Los Desparacidos” an exhibition of works by artists from seven Latin American countries, and a visual response to the tens of thousands of persons who were kidnapped, tortured, killed and “vanished” under repressive right-wing Latin American dictatorships during the late 1950s to the 1980s. The paintings, photographs, sculptures and videos in “The Disappeared/Los Desparacidos” express individual experiences of the turbulence and chaos that rocked their countries during the mid twentieth, century.)

Hearing For Philip Guston is a rare opportunity for audiences, as the piece is quite demanding for the musicians and therefore, rarely programmed. SFNM’s musicians however, are “fantastically excited to perform this monumental work. It is not often that one gets the chance to perform a piece of this stature,” says Mr. Kennedy. “We wanted to format an event that would be interesting to a variety of audiences, for different reasons. We believe that the musically curious and daring will really have an afternoon to remember.”

The concert begins at 1:00 p.m. and will end at 5:00 p.m. at SITE Santa Fe. Tickets are $20 ($10 for full time students and SITE Santa Fe members) and are available at Nicholas Potter Booksellers, at the door, and a limited quantity of tickets available at SITE Santa Fe. Audience members wishing to come and go should take consideration to sit along aisles if possible, and exit and re-enter with care.

Alex Ross on For Philip Guston

The author of the recent The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is also a longtime classical music reviewer for The New Yorker. Here is his account of hearing the piece, For Philip Guston:

On Friday night, I heard Mahler's Eighth Symphony: it harnessed immense forces to a musical narrative of surprising swiftness, even brutal efficiency. Four nights later, I heard something no less gigantic: Morton Feldman's "For Philip Guston," which sent a small complement of musicians into music of vast dimensions. Mahler compared his 8th Symphony to suns and planets revolving; there is something celestial, too, about Feldman's "Guston," whose disconnected slivers of sound glimmer like starlight. Some stretches are dense with figuration and detail; others are nearly empty, with flecks of music hanging here and there. The work stretches itself before the ears like the sky on a clear night; any hints of larger patterns are probably self-invented constellations.

What makes "Guston" fundamentally and wondrously beautiful is its harmony. Feldman's whole career was a search for ways to string together lovely chords, and "Guston" contains some of his most lustrous inventions. He is careful to parcel them out economically, so that they arrive as gratifying shocks after stretches of more neutral sound.These islands of beauty are like suggestions of figuration at the center of an abstract painting. 

There is also a kind of structure to "Guston," or at least so it appeared to one onlooker. The first two hours present some of the toughest, most unyielding material, as if to weed out casual listeners. At about the midway point, Feldman begins to give the sound more tonal and rhythmic focus: there is a dizzyingly beautiful spell of C major, a gently dancing passage in triplets. For much of the way, the three instruments play in separate time signatures, giving the attacks a certain chancy imprecision; but toward the end the meters come into sync.