TVT 24 Newsletter

Photo by Agustín Castilla-Ávila of one of his guitar installations

Classical Gas! The Best Trip Ever – Part 2!

Dear Friends:

After introducing this year’s folk, blues, rock and jazz highlights last week, we’re now thrilled to reveal >The Village Trip’s Classical and New Music program<

It’s an exciting and inventive series of events, each one striking sparks off the others as we explore the work of composers and musicians who lit fires and pushed the boundaries of tonal and sonic possibility, finding new ways to play existing instruments and in some cases inventing new ones.

The Village Trip 2024 presents an exhilarating weekend of concerts around the “American Primitive”, embracing folk idioms, world music, and pre-Western tuning systems. Grammy Award-winning guitarist John Schneider explores works by a pair of “Inventors of Genius”—Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, both pioneers of the “American Primitive”.

Cage’s groundbreaking Sonatas and Interludes (1947), written before his experiments with chance and the I-ching, will be performed by pianist Eliza Garth at St. Mark’s. “Of course he’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor — of genius!” So said Arnold Schoenberg of John Cage. The former developed dodecaphony, thinking of it as the culmination of Western musical traditions, the latter found his own way, turning things upside down, achieving a musical equivalent of the energy and freedom of a Jackson Pollock painting!

Georgia O’Keeffe flipped that on its head, asserting that music can be “translated into something for the eye.” We’ll be celebrating her art, and that of Pollock and Edward Hopper, whose paintings immortalized the Village, in a concert that translates art back into music, hosted by composer Victoria Bond at the sumptuous Salmagundi Arts Club.

Microtonal Village will bring together scholars, composers and performers from twelve countries giving demonstrations and lecture recitals touching on the American Primitive and those “inventors of genius” who changed the conversation. Agustín Castilla-Ávila, guitarist and composer who believes, as did Segovia, that “the guitar is like an orchestra,” will preside.

We’ll take a trip back in time to imagine the music heard in 19th-century tenement courtyards and hear how it influenced later generations. Celebrated flutist Ceylon Mitchell will give the first performance of an exciting new work by Clarice Awad. A collaboration with The Tenement Museum.

See you soon,

Wiliam Anderson and Joan Forsyth
Classical and New Music Director

Grateful to Liz & Cliff for helping with this latest TVT newsletter.

We are dancing around some big concerns.

–Least relevant first: what does it mean to be a Schoenbergian? Milton called himself a Schoenbergian and it meant he was concerned with the very traditional musical phenomena that Boulez & Leibowitz rejected.

I heard this echoed by a comment made by Martin Boykan, that he was interested in what makes a phrase.

–Can we think of Schoenberg as part of a complex musical ecosystem? His musical world is like the Brazilian rainforest. He came to the US and had to figure out what to make of the aspiring young composers who were not of that ecosystem. They were not of that world, could not be of that world. And some who tried to be part of that world risked a crude graft onto it, risked inauthenticity. Cage, Harrison and Partch were not guilty of that. They did what they had to do, becoming, as Schoenberg saw it, equivocally, “inventors of genius”.

–The postwar music scene in the US saw something very curious. Nationalistic art, including anything *volkisch* (folkish) was consciously defused and dismantled in the ensuing Pax Americana, *only to irrupt spontaneously in the US*. Important for me that the Village Trippers know how the American Primitive is truly of that phenomenon. *The Greenwich Village folk scene and the American Primitive are both aspects of that irruption* of what was being dismantled in Europe. Whack-a-mole of the spirit. And folk comes out of masks. Cf. WB Yeats and Bob Dylan.

This makes The Village Trip a very apt forum to examine Cage, Harrison, Partch. And John Schneider is connecting all the dots, tracing the Greenwich Village stories of the key players in the emergence of what becomes eventually very *Californian*.

–TVT is a very fitting forum for an international symposium – “The microtonal Village”, studying pre-Western and non-Western tuning systems, but also the Wild, Wild West of X-EDO. My great thanks to Agustín Castilla-Ávila.

Regarding X-EDO – Leonid Galaganov’s talk makes a very strong case for the work Christopher Trapani, especially his work for the choral group, Ekmeles.