DAVID LEDERMAN Music Professor Mark
Kaplan performs "Two Miniatures" in the UCLA Music
Department’s faculty performance Thursday. The event featured
pieces composed by UCLA faculty members.
By Howard Ho
Daily Bruin Contributor
Painter Ben Shahn once wrote that university teachers make poor
artists because the rigid academy devours any creativity they might
have.
Perhaps Shahn didn’t know about UCLA’s Music
Department, which puts on a performance of faculty compositions at
Schoenberg Hall Thursday.
The concert proved that university professors can, in fact,
still be good artists, even if their academic backgrounds pop up
every now and then.
The evening began with “Five Miniatures,” a piano
piece by Music Professor Roger Bourland. Written just last year,
the piece evoked wide Coplandesque spaces with its use of fifths
and lush diatonic, sometimes jazzy, harmony. Bourland came up with
the piece not out of academic idealism, but from a commission to
write a birthday gift for Estelle Schlueter, a 90-year-old pianist
who had her left pinky shot off at gunpoint.
The piece deals with the logistical problems of how to make nine
fingers sound like 10. Pianist Hojun Lee, with all 10 fingers,
performed it with emotional precision.
The second item, although titled “Two Miniatures,”
bore no resemblance to the previous piece except that it was
performed solo, this time with violinist Mark Kaplan at the
helm.
Composer David Lefkowitz was perhaps the most academic player at
the concert. His “Miniature” series came out of a
desire to explore solo instrumental possibilities, akin to a
scientist dissecting an atom.
The miniatures performed were taken from a larger work with
eight violin miniatures. Each miniature focuses on a harmonic
interval. For example, “Miniature VIII” focused on the
interval of a “second,” or the sound produced from the
first two notes of the famous “Chopsticks.”
Lefkowitz took that interval and organically created an entire
piece out of it, just as a Bach fugue organically develops from the
opening subject.
The solo violin harmonized with itself, further emphasizing the
point of creating a world out of nothing. Seldom does one see a
concert violinist perform without accompaniment, but Kaplan pulled
it off nicely, holding the audience with an austere intensity
mirrored in the mechanical nature of the work.
“Quartet,” another piece by Lefkowitz, was played
next. A standard string quartet, Lefkowitz opted for a simple
combination of flute, cello, violin and piano. Once again,
Lefkowitz bore his academic bones by contrasting chromatic
melodies, similar to a Schoenberg 12 tone row, and a pentatonic
melody, like that found in Asian music.
Though the experimental scientist didn’t exactly create
alchemy, he at least came out with something interesting. The
second movement in particular had a type of surface brilliance
hinting at the style of composer Toru Takemitsu.
The best example of this occurred when pianist Walter Ponce
stood up to play the piano’s strings like a harp, evoking
mysticism and mystery. The final movement recalled the first and
ended triumphantly.
Perhaps the least academic work of the concert was the next
piece, Bourland’s “Preludes.” Like his
miniatures, “Preludes” remain diatonic. In fact, they
have a childish character, which seems fitting since Bourland wrote
them as a college undergraduate. The concluding “Fair”
was especially busy and joyful, as rapidly repeated notes evoked
the din of a crowd.
Chihara’s “Haiku for Two Flutes” came next.
While Lefkowitz merely hinted at Takemitsu, Chihara fully shows the
influence of Takemitsu and Japanese music in general.
The first movement, “Haiku,” imitated the airy
hollow sound and disjunct melodies of Japanese flutes. Chihara, who
actually worked with Takemitsu, successfully brings a modern
sublimity to ancient Japanese traditions.
Ending the night was Paul Reale’s “Palabas
Serenas.” In “Palabas,” a cycle of five songs
written less than a year ago, Reale seemed to be striving for an
operatic grandeur that was lacking in the other pieces of the
night.
The songs are based on five poems by the Chilean poet Gabriela
Mistral. Rather than engaging in an obvious intellectual
experiment, Reale attempts to express the text with a dramatic and
personal sound.
Mezzo-soprano Alma Mora embodied Mistral’s image of a
woman, strong and maternal. The music acts not through melodic
themes but through contours that follow the emotions of the words.
Instead of repeating key motifs, it changes to suit the feelings
expressed in the words. Textures, such as piano pointillism, give
the songs a recitative quality, allowing the natural poetry of
Mistral’s words to permeate.
“I think the text should say everything that the piece is
about,” Reale said in an interview in his office. “My
song cycle occupies a kind of nether region between song and opera,
because there’s an internal drama, an emotional pendulum. It
has a lot do with some very personal concerns that women
have.”
Strangely, Reale does engage in an academic dialectic, though
his work far from resembles a laboratory creation. His beef is much
more human in scope.
“The great challenge was to write a cycle about women and
prove the Susan McClarys of the world wrong,” said Reale,
referring to McClary, a UCLA music history professor.
According to Reale, McClary and her supporters believe that
different social groups will only write music relevant to that
group.
“My feeling is that music operates at a level of
abstraction,” Reale said.
“You can write anything you want. There’s no
limitation on our imagination.”
Perhaps the greatest thrill of attending a faculty
composers’ concert is seeing and applauding the composers
themselves, who anxiously sit in the audience as they watch their
creations grow in the hands of musicians playing for a small, but
devout public (mostly their students).
The music’s creative impact lies in its immediacy. Even if
the faculty has lost its creativity, which it hasn’t, it is
here and now, just like going to see UCLA’s football team
play, win or lose.
The real impairment to creativity would be to cancel wonderful
concerts like this one.