In Which The Blog Goes All Arty And Introspective (For A Change)

While Sarah and most of the rest of the orchestra are still getting over their jet lag from Saturday/Sunday's overnight flight from Minneapolis to London, I'm feeling downright energetic today, having taken the opportunity to jet over to the UK a day early to visit some friends and reacquaint myself with one of my favorite cities.

This morning, I hopped on the Tube and headed down to the area just south of the Thames known as Bankside. For my money, the view from the south bank of the river looking back into Central London is the perfect encapsulation of this complicated metropolis. From a single vantage point, you see London's past, present, and future colliding before your eyes. Look one way, and the sooty, majestic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral fills your field of vision, until you glance down to see Anthony Caro's futuristic Millenium Bridge leading from Bankside to the Cathedral Gardens. Look to the right, and the gleaming cone of the glass skyscraper known as The Gherkin towers above stately old Southwark Bridge. Glance back over your right shoulder, and the unmistakable thatched roof of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre rises comfortably from a riverside walkway which also leads next door to the massive, warehouse-like Tate Modern, arguably the world's most celebrated contemporary art museum since its opening in 2000.

It was the Tate that had brought me here, and specifically, a newly opened exhibit focusing on two of the giants of the Russian/Soviet Constructivist art movement, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova. Having grown up in the dying years of the Cold War, I've always been fascinated by all things Russian, and studied Russian language, literature, art and history through my high school and college years. I remembered Constructivism as something of a precursor to Socialist Realism (though I suspect that real art scholars would call that a distortion,) and more generally as an art movement that I'd never really understood in my school days, so I was eager to take another whack at it.

The original Constructivists (not to be confused with New Constructivists - ain't art fun?) essentially believed that art had become far too bourgeois and enamored of its own worth, and wanted to reduce the artist's profession to something simpler and more scientific than had been the case in the 19th century. Rodchenko and Popova shared a belief that art could and should be made in the same way that an engineer designs a road, by arranging existing materials in a highly meticulous fashion and eschewing emotionalistic flourishes. Their work is doggedly geometric and, usually, completely abstract (they would eventually break with even visionary abstractionists such as Kandinsky over what they saw as Kandinsky's over-reliance on the physical world.)

In looking over the works in the exhibition and reading about the evolution of the Constructivist philosophy, I was struck by one particular paragraph detailing the context of some of Rodchenko's early works. The catalogue reads: "Rodchenko's own investigations placed a particular importance on the line as the sole essential element in a work of art. Colour, tone, texture and surface, he argued, could all be eliminated as mere decoration, or as techniques for imitating the appearance of things."

Now, this is useful information when you're looking at Rodchenko's paintings, but taken simply as a mile marker in the developing ideology of an art movement, it bears the unmistakable ring of rigidity and absolutism, which, to me, is where any ideology (artistic or otherwise) begins to go off the rails. Indeed, only a few years after commiting to the supremacy of line, Rodchenko would paint three flat canvases with a single primary color - red, yellow, and blue - and declare that he had essentially ended the universe of painting. That kind of brash self-importance can be amusing, and even informative, but is always self-defeating in the end, if you ask me.

I bring all this up because, as I wandered through the Tate exhibit, I found myself thinking a lot about the piece of music that will be opening every concert we play on this tour, beginning tomorrow night at the Barbican. It's a not-terribly-well-known work called Slonimsky's Earbox, by one of the lions of American composition, John Adams, and to be perfectly honest, I have a bit of a problem with it.



Let me stress that I have no problem at all with John Adams as a composer. His Chamber Symphony is, in my opinion, one of the very best compositions of the late 20th century, his operas are frequently revelatory, and he has demonstrated throughout his career a willingness and ability to evolve and adapt with the times that most composers haven't the talent or imagination to achieve.

That having been said, there are some Adams pieces that I find myself inwardly frustrated with when I perform them, and Slonimsky is one of them. It's the kind of piece that many listeners and critics would label as "minimalist," though that label has been known to annoy Adams. Essentially, it's machine music, steadily driving forward through the use of snippets, small motives, and repeated drones. It doesn't have melodies or traditional harmonic motion, and instead uses the ever-changing blend of disparate sounds to create a flow. Dynamic changes, when they occur, are stark and jarring, and traditional phrasing is almost non-existant (at least, on the individual level at which musicians normally think of it.)

This may be a flawed comparison, but as I stared at the Rodchenko paintings, I began to see them as a visual representation of Adams's Slonimsky. What better way to describe such music than as a highly developed representation of line and geometry, with a bare minimum of colo(u)r, tone, texture and surface serving as mere ornament? In a way, Adams is asking the listener to experience a complete work of music performed by that most vibrant and versatile of ensembles, a full symphony orchestra, but to do so without most of the normal accoutrements and contexts that an orchestra provides.

I suspect that this may be the reason that Adams's music has a tendency to be easier to listen to than it is to perform. Even if we disagree with a philosophy that says that only line and geometry are important to the creation of art, our minds are fully capable of indulging the idea long enough to appreciate a painting created under those strictures. Similarly, a piece like Slonimsky can sound to the human ear like a constantly bubbling fount of musical ideas, even as it asks the musicians performing it to put aside many of the ideas and skills that we're trained to bring to every new piece we play and focus only on the endlessly cycling notes in front of our eyes.

It occurred to me as I left the Tate that Rodchenko was lucky to be working in a medium like painting, where his canvasses are left to history exactly as he imagined them. Poor John Adams has to simply trust that overanalytical performers like me won't screw up his musical ideas at the first opportunity just because we don't fully agree with the philosophy behind them...