The Justice

Media Credit: David Sheppard-Brick Prof.?Joshua Gordon (MUS) played several pieces at the concert for Carter, including some by Tod Machover.

Good artwork can be described as that which breaks the stagnation of everyday life and thereby forces the members of the audience to reorient and, by so doing, reexamine, their lives. Elliott Carter's music presents such a challenge: to reexamine our definition of music by presenting something that is abstracted from what we typically consider to be music. On Jan. 26 a concert was held in honor of the 100th birthday of Elliot Carter, an influential contemporary composer. The evening's fare was a combination of solo performances on piano and cello and a rendition of Carter's Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948). The evening's performers were Lydian member and cellist Prof. Joshua Gordon (MUS) and pianist Randall Hodgkinson. The program included pieces by Carter as well as some by two other composers, Carter's mentor Charles Ives and his protégé Tod?Machover.

Hodgkinson began the evening's music with "Thoreau for Piano," a movement from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata. The music was distinctly modern and began with a somberly dissonant piano figure. The closeness of the tones in the first exploratory line coupled with liberal use of the sustain pedal resulted in a rippling sound that, despite its softness, had a distinctive physical quality: a sort of pulse perceivable in the thorax. The piece meandered at times, becoming rhythmically loose and harmonically undefined, then recollected, gathering in forceful crescendos before ending in consonant harmony. As the piece became more focused, hints of jazz in the lower register of Hodgkinson's piano playing emerged. But beyond this incidental resemblance, the spirit of jazz in the performance was present only abstractly in the piece's exploratory, discursive nature. Otherwise, the style was purely modern classical, atonal and metrically complex.

In accordance with the evening's theme, "Thoreau for Piano" was a piece of music that could not be examined separately from the instrument for which it was composed. It exploited the piano's historically important feature-the dynamic range for which it is named "piano-forte" (literally translated, "soft-loud"). The piece shifted from soft, reflective washes of sound and muted low-register ostinato to percussive, chaotic expressions in the upper register, all the while never losing the piano's distinct subtlety to the soft-loud binary. The piece ended as it began, tentatively and subtly, with its sonic elements embodied by the movements of the performer.

Continued...

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