Frescoes - War In Heaven / The Cave Of Orcus - William Bolcom

 

Frescoes - War In Heaven / The Caves Of Orcus

William Bolcom

Frescoes

Part I: War In Heaven 

Part II: The Caves Of Orcus

Bruce Mather - Piano & Harmonium 

Pierrette LePage - Piano & Harpsichord

Engineering & Musical Supervision: Marc J. Aubort, Joanna Nickrenz (Elite Recording, Inc.)

Mastering: Robert C. Ludwig (Sterling Sound, Inc.)

Dolby-system Recording

Coordinator: Teresa Sterne

Cover Art: Griesbach/Martucci

Art Direction & Design: Paula Bisacca

Special thanks for invaluable help during the recording sessions to harmonium expert Gdalia Kowalsky, and to Baldwin Piano's Concert Technician Steve Borrell

Nonesuch Records H-71297 (Stereo)

1974

Jacket Notes: The word "fresco" refers to the technique of painting on fresh plaster. Early Italian Renaissance fresco masters are known to have worked quickly before the plaster dried; the speed of their work undoubtedly contributed to both the size of the frescoes and the sweep of their gestures in space. (A modern counterpart might be Jackson Pollock, whose "action painting" would have been far less "active" on a smaller canvas.) I am sure any painter, writer, or composer feels the need sometimes to "hew the air"; a sort of damn-the-torpedoes attitude takes over and there doesn't seem to be time to go over details-only to plunge full speed ahead. I felt the need to write Frescoes this way.

The work's most immediate source-material was an early piano duet of mine I rediscovered while visiting my old school-friend Bruce Mather in Montreal; I had written the piece as an experiment around 1960 when we were both students in Paris, and it didn't work as a piece then or now. But the germ idea - a pitting of two triads (C major and E-flat minor) against each other- seemed intriguing enough to set a new work in motion. Many composers, after years of trying to reject tonality, are now re-espousing it in one form or another, often using it in different ways from the classical masters. In Frescoes, the tonal element partakes of both traditional and non-traditional uses, ultimately reducible to the two triads just mentioned.

Jumbled half-remembrances of frescoes at the Campo Santo in Pisa (which, reportedly, also inspired Liszt's Totentanz), friezes at Pompeii, bits of Virgil and Milton, a cantata by one of the earlier Bachs, and a frightening brush with the Abyss were all geneses of the piece. The apocalyptic mode may come too easily to us today (one gets the image of artists returning again and again to the edge of doom, like tourists), and I suspect that in these times the most difficult thing to write would be something akin to Haydn's healthy joyousness. All the same, Frescoes is undeniably "apocalyptic"; I could not write it any other way. Ours is an era wherein the refrain of William Dunbar's 500-year-old macaronic poem returns to toll like a great mournful bell: Timor mortis conturbat me ("The fear of death tortures me").

In Johann Christoph Bach's cantata Es erhub sich ein Streit, depicting the war in heaven between Michael and Lucifer, two choruses hurl C-major chords at each other almost endlessly, in a bold Monteverdian stroke. Suddenly the two tremendous angels battling in midair appear in the mind's eye, motionless (to our accelerated time-sense), poised in eternal combat. This is the central image of War in Heaven; the great battle is described in the Book of Revelation and in Book VI of Paradise Lost. Milton's account is especially vivid:

...now storming fury rose,
And clamor such as heard in Heav'n till now 

Was never, Arms on Armor clashing bray'd 

Horrible discord, and the madding 

Wheels Of brazen Chariots rag'd; dire was the noise 

Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss 

Of fiery Darts in flaming volleys flew, 

And flying vaulted either Host with fire. 

          VI, 207-214.

I see armies enmeshed in enormous tugs-of-war, swords and trumpets gleaming in the blinding sunlight; precipitous darknesses; Michael rending mountains to overcome Satan's mighty engines of war; the blasted plain afterward, smoke rolling "in dusky wreaths, reluctant flames"- and finally the inevitable irony of the whole enterprise. Giants are reduced to lead soldiers by this alchemy, for the war is not won. In Revelation: "And the great dragon was cast out... into the earth." Feeding the irony are efflorescences of early-19th-century battle-pieces and gospel organ-tunes on the vast canvas. The war becomes what it is: a cosmic joke.

Orcus was the lower world in Roman mythology, best described in Virgil's sonorous periods:

Vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus orci 

Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;
pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus, 

et Metus, et malesuada Fames, ac turpis Egestas, 

terribiles visu formae, Letumque, Labosque; 

tum consanguineus Leti Sopor, et mala mentis 

Gaudia, mortiferumque adverso in limine Bellum, 

ferreique Eumenidum thalami, et Discordia demens, 

vipereum crinem vittis innexa cruentis.
          Aeneid, VI, 273-281.

Before the very entrance, in the outer jaws of Orcus

Grief and the avenging Cares have made their beds; 

there dwell the pale Diseases and dismal Old Age,
and Fear, and evil-counseling Famine, and loathsome Poverty: 

forms terrible to see; and Death and Toil,
and then Sleep, Death's kinsman, and all the Evil Joys
of the mind, and there against the threshold, death-bearing War, 

and the iron couches of the Furies, and raging Discord, 

her serpent hair entwined with bloody bands.

In The Caves of Orcus, the Stygian journey gives onto larger and larger vaults: Death's progress, as in the description in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, comes in stages. We pass by the denizens of Death in a dance that has no hope of cease, that has gone on forever; finally we arrive at the last cave, the end of everything. At the Campo Santo, Hell, in great Dantesque circles, holds at its center a huge Devil merrily devouring some unfortunate miscreant – almost a gay and noisy image. Here, however, in the "land of Shades," reign deep silence. and the eternal hopelessness one finds in the eyes of those elegantly-coiffed creatures in Roman friezes – a hopelessness that is the only hope they know. WILLIAM BOLCOM

Frescoes was written for Bruce Mather and his wife, Pierrette LePage, who gave its premiere performance in Toronto, July 21, 1971, during the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Summer Festival.

For each player, two keyboards are set at right. angles to facilitate rapid change between instruments. In this recording the first pianist also plays a two-manual Neupert harpsichord equipped with 4', 8', 16', and lute stops; the second pianist alternates with an electrified Estey parlor organ probably dating from the turn of the century. Both pianos are Baldwin SD-10s. None of the instruments is amplified.. -W. B.

Canadian composer and pianist Bruce Mather (b. 1939, Toronto) studied piano with Alberto Guerrero and Alexander Uninsky in Toronto, and with Lazare Lévy in Paris; in composition, he worked principally with Darius Milhaud in Aspen and Paris. He earned degrees in music from Stanford University and the University of Toronto. Since 1966, Mr. Mather has taught composition at McGill University, Montreal; he plays regularly for the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec concert series.

After studying with Constantin Klimoff in Quebec City and Alberto Guerrero in Toronto, Pierrette LePage (b. 1939, Montreal) continued piano studies in Paris with Lazare Lévy. Returning in 1962, she toured the Canadian universities under the auspices of the Canada Council. She taught at the University of Toronto for several years and in 1966 joined the faculty of McGill University. Miss LePage has appeared as soloist with the Toronto Symphony and performs frequently for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

As duo-pianists, Pierrette LePage and Bruce Mather have toured Canada and have performed in Europe at the French Festival International de Royan and in Brus- sels' Reconnaissance de la Musique Moderne. Mr. Mather has recorded for RCA Victor and the C.B.C. International Service; this album marks the record debut of Bruce Mather and Pierrette LePage in joint performance.

Born in Seattle in 1938, William Bolcom entered the University of Washington at age 11 as a private student in piano (with Berthe Poncy Jacobson) and composition (with John Verrall and George McKay), and earned his Bachelor's degree there. In 1958, he began study with composer Darius Milhaud in California and Paris; in 1964, he received the first Doctor of Musical Arts degree conferred by Stanford University. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Bolcom has taught music at the University of Washington and at the City University of New York (Queens and Brooklyn colleges), and has been Composer in Residence at the Yale Drama School and the NYU School of the Arts. Since Fall 1973, he has taught composition at the School of Music, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Bolcom has produced a wide variety of works for the stage and for instrumental and vocal ensemble –  among them Sessions I-IV (Session IV recorded on Philips 839.322 DSY) and Black Host for organ, percussion, and tape (performed by William Albright on Nonesuch H-71260) and a large body of piano music, including 12 Etudes (recorded by the composer on Advance FGR-14S), and numerous rags, two of which are heard in Bolcom's album Heliotrope Bouquet/Piano Rags 1900- 1970, Nonesuch H-71257, 12 others in his recording for Jazzology, JCE-72. A prolific writer on musical subjects, William Bolcom is also co-author with Robert Kimball of Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake, a book about Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's contribution to the black musi- cal theater of the '20s (New York: Viking Press, 1973).