Anarchic Harmonies: Frescobaldi | Cage

Stefan Hussong and Mike Svoboda - Anarchic Harmonies: Frescobaldi--Cage

Frescobaldi and Cage. More than three hundred years separate them. Three hundred years of music. Neither rises out of the universal murmuring unaided. Frescobaldi's predecessors are found among the Spanish composers of lute and keyboard music, such as Trabaci, Mayone, and Milan, and in the great Monteverdi. Cage picked up on many things that began in the work of Satie, Ives, and Cowell.

Cage's Forty-Four Harmonies is part of a substantial series of works that Cage wrote between 1974 and 1979. The occasion for the work was the bicentennial of the United States of America, and one of Cage's contributions was Apartment House 1776, which included Fourteen Tunes, Four Marches, and Two Imitations, as well as Forty-Four Harmonies - all works that make use of models taken from the musical traditions of the United States.

Harmonies was written in a situation similar to one Cage had found himself in once before. When he wanted to arrange for two pianos Socrate by Erik Satie, the publisher did not grant permission. Without further ado, he subjected the piece to a reductionist procedure that not only condensed the material taken from Satie into a single melodic line but also used an arbitrary transposition to make its pitches completely unrecognizable.

This time it was the Executive Committee of the Moravian Music Foundation that refused to collaborate. His request to use music by Moravian immigrants was rejected. Here, too, Cage fell back on an elaborate procedure, which can no longer be reconstructed fully, that once again subverts the copyright in an almost anarchistic fashion. Walter Zimmermann has given us extensive and enlightening description of it.

Cage used a procedure with which he had long been experimenting, employing the Chinese book of oracles, the I Ching, to answer questions prepared in advance. According to Zimmermann, the questions were as follows: (1) Which notes of each of the four parts will be retained? (2) Which combinations of the four parts will be retained? (3) Which of the retained notes will be held for how long? He worked through the homophonic Moravian models chord by chord in this way. According to Zimmermann, Cage always made several attempts, finally deciding on, in his own words, "the least interesting" possibility, that is, the constellation that was least reminiscent of traditional harmonic phrasing.

Cage's intention was to push the notes so far apart that they would be free of any reminiscence of the place and historical situation of their origin. In this way they could escape the laws of tradition and yet retain the spirit of harmony. Precisely because of this, as Walter Zimmermann sums it up, what is perhaps the central idea of the American Revolution, the "spirit of independence," which was hidden in the original and only returned in the remainders of the subtraction, could achieve its innermost truth.

Frescobaldi's Canzoni are autonomous instrumental works. The genre grew out of vocal models: first the French chanson and then the Italian madrigal. Their richness of contrast, their juxtaposition of polyphonic and homophonic sections, of changes of tempo and beat, their principle of dialogue of upper and lower registers are all features of the canzone.

The first instrumental pieces that are more than intabulations of chansons begin to appear in the mid-sixteenth century. The canzone finally becomes instrumental in the work of E. Pasquini, who introduced melodic variation of the soggetti to rhythmic variation. Frescobaldi would ultimately develop that principle into the variation canzone. (Rolf W. Stoll)

Tracklisting:

1. Canzona quinta detta la Tromboncina {4:00}

2. Harmony No. 18 {2:24}

3. Harmony No. 26 {0:57}

4. Harmony No. 35 {2:29}

5. Canzon Seconda Basso solo {4:35}

6. Harmony No. 11 {1:03}

7. Harmony No. 14 {0:47}

8. Harmony No. 15 {1:21}

9. Harmony No. 42 {1:41}

10. Canzona prima detta la Bonuisia {3:39}

11. Harmony No. 3 {3:00}

12. Canzon Prima Basso solo {4:23}

13. Harmony No. 38 {4:45}

14. Harmony No. 5 {10:36}

15. Canzona seconda detta la Bernardinia {3:25}

16. Harmony No. 28 {5:51}

17. Harmony No. 19 {3:56}

18. Canzona settima detta la Superba {3:55}

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