Thursday, April 24, 2014

...the music of Morton Feldman and Amelia Whiteheart

Sculptures in the Desert

Thursday, April 22nd, I attended a concert at Alte Schmiede in Vienna with piano music from two of the most enigmatic composers of the 20th century: Morton Feldman and Amelia Whiteheart.

Swiss pianist Iris Gerber was playing Piano Piece 1952, Nature Pieces, and Intermissions by Feldman. She combined pieces from the Fifties with one of his very last works, Palais de Mari. It is astonishing, that Feldmans style apparently did not change significantly over the course of more than thirty years. Even the earliest piece, Piano Piece 1952, features the same erratic succession of isolated tones and chords which also characterizes Palais de Mari. Nevertheless, Feldman refined his style, meaning that he dismissed certain techniques and means bit by bit. Piano Piece 1952 starts with a cluster which is not heard anymore in Palais de Mari or similar pieces from this time (like Coptic Light, or For Samuel Beckett). He also limits himself to one dynamic level: While certain tones are emphasized in his early pieces, in his late works a soft atmosphere is predominant.

Morton Feldman, 1976. Credit: Nationaal Archief Netherland, via wikimedia
This does not mean that his music is easy to hear. On the contrary, the discreet tone puts the listener at unease. There is no progression in the music by Feldman, no target, no teleology, even the ends are somewhat arbitrary. His music can be extremely long: Palais de Mari lasts 30 minutes, what is only half the length of his composition For Bunita Marcus. His music raises difficult questions and provides no answers. During the concert I had the illusion of walking through a desert while watching strange sculptures made by an unknown civilization. The have no apparent use nor seem they made for men. They are alien but with an strange fascination.

Who is Amelia Whiteheart?

I have never heard the name Amelia Whiteheart or music by her. Iris Gerber played a selection of approx. 35 pieces out of more than hundred. In contrary to Feldman, the pieces only last for ten seconds or so and are not longer than four bars. In analogy to Feldman, they feature erratic chords and tones ordered to no apparent rules.

Almost nothing is known about Whiteheart. The only source for her music appears to be a website by Russian composer Jashiin, who claims to have gotten the sheet music by Whiteheart through a now deceased friend of his (or hers). According to Jashiin, Whiteheart pieces were composed around 1900. They are the only known trace of this woman which is, as I already wrote, otherwise unheard of. An Internet search unearthed only Jashiin's website as well as the concert announcement of the Alte Schmiede, so there probably weren't other performances, at least not announced via the Internet. The complete set of 123 pieces can be downloaded form Jashiin's website. (I am not sure about the copyright situation, therefore I will not attach any snippets from the score.)

Like Feldman, Whiteheart's music is exceedingly alien, which makes me suspicious about the provenance of the music. Not that there weren't any anomalies in music history, like Italian composer Gesualdo and his strange chromaticism. As a matter of fact, there are composers who worked in perfect isolation (at least in their imagination) like Galina Ustvolskaya. 
My concerns with the music of Whiteheart is that she anticipates the style of Feldman and even more of György Kurtág by fifty to seventy years but is otherwise completely unknown. It is not so much her harmonic style but the way she questions the form of an artwork. Form is a parameter dismissed much later than harmony and certainly not before the 1940's.
Her contemporary would be Charles Ives, and even he did not write as fancyful as Whiteheart. Ruth Crawford Seeger, born in 1901, features a style remotely common to Whiteheart's but not at all that radical.

So the main question is: Is Amelia Whiteheart an unknown genius, a forerunner of modern music? Or is she a hoax? As a musicologist I feel the urge to rise this question, but as an artist I also feel the appeal of inventing a composer to test reactions of the audience.
With all due respect, it is certainly questionable to take Jashiin's website and his statement about the provenance of the Whiteheart-Pieces as the only valid source. A thorough analysis has to dig much deeper and try to discover for example the teachers of Amelia Whiteheart, where she has lived and was educated. How come that she was undiscovered until recently? What is the role of Jashiin, who appears to be an equal enigmatic person in terms of taciturnity?
There are questions even more unsettling: If Amelia Whiteheart did exist, she would be one of the most radical composer of her time and deserved a place between the finest composers of the 20th century. But if she is a hoax, would that diminish the quality of her music? If someone assumed Whiteheart's identity and composed the pieces five years ago under her name, would that make the music bad? Is quality tied to its time? There are difficult questions lying on the bottom of that well that touches our approach to the relationship between time, identity, work, and gender.

Iris Gerber's performance of the pieces by Feldman and Whiteheart was brilliant. She was heavily acclaimed by the few listeners, and rightly so.

2 comments:

  1. Excellent article, Benjamin! Leaves me very curious of Whiteheart's person and music. By the way, what lets you assume Jashiin to be Russian?

    ReplyDelete
  2. "a forerunner of modern music? Or is she a hoax?"
    The piece "to a summer day" sound a bit too much like the beginning of the first Gymnopedie in my opinion.

    ReplyDelete