A LIVING ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE VOICE (3/17/2011)

 

Renee Weiler Concert Hall at the Greenwich House Music School

In the fall, I heard Joan La Barbara perform Christian Marclay's Manga Scroll at the Whitney Museum and was totally entranced with the range of her voice coupled with an absolute musicality.  So I was very happy to learn that she would be giving a recital at the Greenwich House Music School.  Associated with so many avant-garde composers and a composer herself, her recital featured works by Morton Feldman, John Cage and herself. 

The very short Feldman song, Only, is a meditative work cradled in silence.  A setting of a Rilke poem, the unaccompanied song begins and ends with a measure of silence with points of silence interspersed.  The jazz-tinged vocal writing very simply and clear brings the poem to life with poignancy.  

The elegiac tone of Only continued with what has always been one of my favorite vocal works by John Cage, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, a setting of fragments from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.   This work, with its constant recycling of three notes in different combinations and strange rapping and tapping on various parts of the piano, anticipates the "beat" performances of the 1950s although it was composed in 1942. Like  the Feldman song, there is definitely a meditative quality to the work.  However, the Cage work has more of a chant-like style and the piano tappings provide not only a rhythmic counterpoint to the work but also create a range of sounds and pitches (depending on where the piano is being struck) that adds a slightly threatening tone to the work.  Ms. La Barbara's notes cite that this piano part hints "at sounds of a strange forest." 

"The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs"

night by silentsailing night. . .
Isobel. . .
wildwoods' eyes and primarose hair,
quietly,
all the woods so wild, in mauves of
moss and daphnedews,
how all so still she lay neath of the
whitethorn, child of tree,
like some losthappy leaf,
like blowing flower stilled,
as fain would she anon,
for soon again 'twil be,
win me, woo me, wed me,
ah weary me!
deeply,
Now evencalm lay sleeping; night
Isobel
Sister Isobel
Saintette Isobel
madame Isa
Veuve La belle

Ms. La Barbara then performed a setting of another portion of Finnegan's Wake that was composed by Cage as a memorial to Cathy Berberian (whose recordings of Cage's music introduced me to this repertoire), Nowth Upon Nacht.  After the quiet, meditative opening songs, the sudden slam of the piano lid was certainly startling, and the the high pitched, declamatory rendering of the text was quite unsettling. Just looking at the texts for both

songs reveals the foundation upon which Cage developed his settings.

"Nowth Upon Nacht"

nowth upon nacht, while in his tumbril Wachtman Havelook
seequeerscenes, from yonsides of the choppy, punkt by his
curserbog, went long the grassgross bumpinstrass that henders
the pubbel to pass, stowing his bottle in a hole for at whet his
whuskle to stench ecrooksman, sequestering for lover's lost pro-
pertied offices the leavethings from allpurgers' night, og gneiss
ogas gnasty, kikkers, brillers, knappers and bands, handsboon
and strumpers, sminkysticks and eddiketsflaskers;

Hearing a Joyce setting was a wonderful way to spend a St.Patrick's Day evening. Although, I am sure others might have different ideas!

It was then Ms. La Barbara's turn to present some of her own work.   With Gatekeeper, uses both her vast experience with vocal sounds and electronic music  to create a very evocative and challenging piece (her husband, by the way, is Morton Subotnik).  Using works of Virginia Woolf, Joseph Cornell and Edgar Allen Poe as sources of inspiration, Ms. La Barbara takes listeners on a journey that attempts to make the workings of the mind audible.  In her performance she uses the microphone as an instrument and always exhibited amazing synchrony with with recorded sounds that are part of the work.  It was with this work that her vast inventory of sounds was put to use to explore many facets of the wanderings of the mind. Using streams of utterances that at times resembled glossolalia, at other times evoked dialects from many parts of the world, and then at other times drew sounds from nature, Ms. La Barbara drew listeners into a world as deep and probing as any conventional vocal work.  She never created sounds merely as a gimmick or an effect,

With the final work of the program Ms. La Barbara let the audience experience an improvisation to reveal something of her creative process.  One thing I noticed with Gatekeeper and that was even more pronounced in this unaccompanied work (Solitary Journey) was her use of hand and arm gestures.  Sometimes her fingers seemed to be recreating the counting symbols of Indian music.  I asked her about this at the reception that followed the recital and she said that she uses her arms (especially the left arm) and hands to help her focus and channel her sounds. She said she tries to minimize this in performance as she does not want it to be a distraction.  In this improvisation she seemed to create a basic sound that she would explore and grow from before moving on to another basic sound.  Returning to a previously heard basic sound provided a landmark for listeners. An audience member remarked to me that it was as if Ms. La Barbara was creating a sculpture in sound.  Once again, her brilliance, total musicality and encyclopedic knowledge of vocal sounds was stunning and also revealed that vocalists who explore the world of sounds often take very different paths.  The fact that each vocalist is his or her own unique instrument is nowhere more demonstrated than in comparing the work of Ms. La Barbara with Meredith Monk.