Two 21st Century Classics

Afterimage: music by Christopher Ceronne, Jacob Cooper, Paganini, Pergolesi

"A story is an operation on duration, an enchantment that affects the flow of time, contracting it or expanding it." In his fourth lecture in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino discusses "Quickness", and finds in literature a motive force that speeds up and/or slows down our perception of time.

"A writer's labor involves keeping track of different times: Mercury's time and Vulcan's time; a message of spontaneity obtained by means of patient, meticulous adjustments; a flash of insight that immediately takes on the finality of that which was inevitable; and also time that flows for no reason other than to allow feelings and thoughts to settle and ripen, unfettered by any impatience, any fleeting contingency."

If literature involves these temporal operations, how much more can music do, entwined as it is with its own built-in passage of time. When Jacob Cooper wrote Stabat Mater Dolorosa (2009), his gloss on Pergolesi's great 18th century choral work, he was thinking in particular of Tachypsychia, the alteration of the perception of time due to various physiological states, most notably life-threatening events, when time can seem to stand still. Cooper stretches out Pergolesi's beautiful phrases, exaggerating the already meditative music until it sounds almost like a kind of hallucinatory chanting. I'm sure that Cooper was aware of the legend that Pergolesi wrote the Stabat Mater on his own deathbed, and that none other than Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his own remix of the Pergolesi original: his parody cantata Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden. So the composer is doubling down, and in doing so has created a classic work for the 21st century. This performance of Cooper's work, along with the first movement of the Pergolesi original, is so impressive. The String Orchestra of Brooklyn, under the sensitive direction of Conductor Eli Spindel, are completely solid in Cooper's long, long phrases, but properly stylish in the Pergolesi. The two vocal soloists, soprano Mellissa Hughes and mezzo-soprano Kate Maroney, likewise navigate with aplomb these stylistic changes, from Pergolesi's idiosyncratic mixture of the operatic and the sacred, to the other-worldly swoops of Cooper.




Another pair of works make up the rest of the album: Christopher Cerrone's High Windows (2013), along with one of its sources, Nicolo Paganini's Caprice no. 6 in G minor, "The Trill". High Windows is another classic work, which besides its trilling violin reference includes a reference to an earlier Cerrone piece, Hoyt–Schermerhorn. This is no simple pastiche, though, but a work of complex allusions organized in what might seem from a contemporary music perspective to be a surprising way, as a 17th century Sonata. Like a work with which it shares a beautiful aural texture, Edward Elgar's Introduction & Allegro, Cerrone's piece is written for string orchestra and string quartet, and is beautifully played here by the Argus Quartet and the SOB. The title of the work refers to a Philip Larkin poem of the same name, which, like the music, is about dreams and ultimate transcendence. What a challenging, and satisfying project from the String Orchestra of Brooklyn!

Neapolitan music of light and shade

Neapolitan Concertos by Fiorenza, Pergolesi, A. Scarlatti, Porpora & Mancini

The composers represented on this disc are roughly Bach and Handel's contemporaries (Nicola Porpora and Francesco Mancini), or come from the generation before (Alessandro Scarlatti) or after (Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Nicola Fiorenza). They all share a common heritage and a peculiarly brilliant and lyrical style intensified by a sophisticated system of conservatories with high musical standards for both vocal and instrumental music. Josetxu Obregon has created a varied and at times inspired program for the fine players of La Ritirata. The featured soloists are all excellent: Tamar Lalo (recorder), Hiro Kurosaki (violin), Ignacio Prego and Daniel Oyarzabal (harpischords), with his own cello solo rounding up this distinguished group of musicians. The standout works are, unsurprisingly, by Pergolesi (a spritely work featuring two harpsichords), and Alessandro Scarlatti (a recorder concerto on the Telemann level if not quite in the Bach/Handel range). Naples is a city of light and shade; melancholy is never far away, even in the midst of its gaiety. Thanks to Glossa for such a compelling album.

Greatness in parodies and covers

In October and November of 1967 Bob Dylan recorded his album John Wesley Harding. The critical response to the album when it was released on December 27 was universally positive, and the album was a big success, hitting #2 on the album charts in the US, and #1 in the UK.



Jimi Hendrix was in London in early 1968, recording at Olympic Studios, and on January 21st he heard a tape of Dylan's song All Along the Watchtower. Hendrix immediately began recording his first versions of the song, putting multiple takes on tape, and later in New York, overdubbing and remixing until he released the celebrated single on September 21, 1968.



Dylan talks about the song in an interview published in the Fort-Lauderdale, Sun Sentinel in July 29, 1995:

Q: How did you feel when you first heard Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower"?

 A: It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn't think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day.

The Hendrix version of All Along the Watchtower has been called one of the greatest covers in popular music; it certainly has my vote.

Let's skip back a couple of centuries, to Naples in 1736. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi has just written a new setting, in the modern style, of the Stabat Mater, for an annual Good Friday service. Though Pergolesi died within a couple of months (indeed, only two weeks before Good Friday, and at the absurdly early age of 26), the work was an immediate hit. Its fame reached Germany, and in the mid-1740s J.S. Bach wrote a transcription (which has also been called a parody, in the earlier musical sense of the word), setting it to the words of Psalm 51.

Here is Pergolesi's Vidit Suum Dulcem Natum:



These are heartbreaking words:

Vidit suum dulcem natum
Morientem desolatum,
Dum emisit spiritum.

She saw her sweet Son
dying, forsaken,
as He gave up the spirit.

(Translation)

Pergolesi's ending is particularly touching. As Christ nears his end, the strings give a last angry forte cry at "forsaken", and then play sotto voce to the end of the movement.  This anticipates the soprano's final anguished line "as He gave up the spirit", sung in whole notes and, again, sotto voce. This is music drama of the highest order.

When Bach adapted this movement, the words from his Psalm had much less pathos, and more mystery:

Sieh, du willst die Wahrheit haben,
die geheimen Weisheitsgaben
hast du selbst mir offenbart.

See, you want the truth, and you yourself revealed to me
the secrets of wisdom.

((Translation: Vera Lucia Calabria)



Bach does some cool things with his source material in this movement. Most importantly he recognizes the greatness of the original; the beautiful melodies and suspensions of the durezze e ligature style remain. Bach latches onto a cool figure that Pergolesi has the strings play starting in the third bar. "There's some mystery for my next bit," Bach might have thought. But Pergolesi doesn't come back to that very spacey riff.

So Bach gives the bit to the viola, which throughout Pergolesi's work has been stuck doubling the continuo, and lets it run with it. The movement becomes a soprano solo with viola obligatto.

This new version is no less affecting, and I'm hoping I'm not wildly off base when I make the analogy between Bach's viola and Jimi Hendrix's guitar solos. There is pathos in both the Pergolesi/Bach and Dylan/Hendrix stories. Pergolesi and Hendrix both died much too young. But musical greatness calls out to musical greatness, and the adaptive re-use of another artist's material can reach the same heights as original work.