On August 24, at the Wende Museum in Culver City—a few blocks from where Victor Fleming shot Gone with the Wind—the pianist Gloria Cheng played a short recital of mid-century and new compositions as part of the current season of Salastina, a local chamber ensemble. The performance ranged from works by the formidable Pierre Boulez to pieces by film composers such as John Williams and Randy Newman. This “range,” however, can be misleading: sometimes the most complex mid-century avant-garde music, such as that composed by Boulez, is the simplest to grasp. Newman’s witticisms may demand more from us than a “toy” by Boulez.
It’s a perennial irritation that some believe the appreciation of modernist music requires arcane and hard-won knowledge, that “complexity” demands an elect listener. Boulez’s music is an obvious example. Cheng played “Courtes dérives à partir d’Éclat,” a piece Boulez gave to her as a wedding gift, and which he described as a “toy.” It was an entertaining performance, in part because she had the audience shuffle the pages of the score before she played it. Each page is a single musical gesture, and Boulez only fixed the first and last in sequence. Cheng was in her element, too, as she’s widely known for her interpretations of modern and contemporary works. The piece is imposing in one sense: it’s dissonant and rhythmically unpredictable. Its pitches cluster into sheets of sound. Rhythms seem to share the randomness of dropped marbles.
Although we often find meaning in the patterns of sound we call music, first, music is vibrating air and silence. We may not follow the structure, but we hear the piano moving the air at specific frequencies. And ultimately, this is what Boulez’s “toy” is “about.” It’s simple in that each of its gestures coheres into what the composer and theorist James Tenney called a single “gestalt.” This is the difference between, say, someone giving you a handful of change, and giving you two nickels and two dimes. The complexity of “Courtes dérives à partir d’Éclat” makes it simple. It gives us handfuls. It subverts our musical expectations because it doesn’t “move” or develop. Coloristic changes surround a single prominent pitch. The air trembles and relaxes.
Cheng also played a few jazz-inflected pieces by Anthony Davis, John Williams, and Gernot Wolfgang. Duke Ellington inspired Anthony Davis’s piece “Turquoise,” but for me, it evokes Thelonious Monk’s tune “Blue Monk.” In the piece, Davis seems to transfigure Monk’s sprightly ascending sixth motif into a gentler idea that drifts toward gospel and later into more sophisticated jazz voicings. It has a warm, inviting sound. Davis’s jazz influences are well integrated—you never get the sense that he’s assembling the piece from disparate parts.
John Williams’s “Strays, Duke, and…Blind Tom,” however, is more pastiche. It drifts from dramatic, breathless dissonance to a boogie-woogie motif, then to stride. It’s inventive, even restless with its ideas, and Cheng played it with style, but it barely holds together. The title gives its eclecticism away: “Strays” is a nickname for Billy Strayhorn; “Duke” is Duke Ellington; “Blind Tom” refers to the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Tom Wiggins.
A few pieces were welcome surprises: Erich Zeisl’s “Der einsame Hirte” (The lonely shepherd), Adelaide Pereira da Silva’s “Valsa-Chôro,” and Randy Newman’s witty “Outdoors but Not the Red River Valley.” Erich Zeisl scored the film The Postman Always Rings Twice, among others, but also left several less commercial works, including a collection of children’s pieces for piano, Stücke für Barbara. “Der einsame Hirte” begins with a gentle motif sounded in fifths—an airy, ambiguous interval that allows the work to surprise us with its harmonic turns. The piece is transparent and folksy one moment, rich and conflicted the next. Zeisl’s forlorn shepherd seems to wander between Ellington, Schoenberg, and Debussy. Cheng played it with a remarkable gentleness, often reaching for softer dynamics from the Steinway. At one point her fingers trembled as she tried to coax the barest wisp of a note from the piano.
Pereira da Silva’s “Valsa-Chôro” is an elegant waltz, composed in something of a late-Romantic idiom, which at moments recalled Bill Evans’s cool, glass-like voicings. Hearing it for the first time made me wonder why I didn’t know the Brazilian composer’s music. The piece is appealing, but perhaps out of step—she composed her “Valsa-Chôro” in the mid-1960s, when many other composers were exploring a more abstract language. Boulez, for example, composed Éclat around the same time. But it is evocative. Octaves flutter and rise from the piano. Its lyrical melody drifts in both mood and tempo.
As an encore, Cheng played Randy Newman’s “Outdoors but Not the Red River Valley,” a piece she had commissioned, which is also the last movement of an homage to his musical family. The Newmans are royalty in Hollywood, having composed scores for countless films over the years. The director John Ford wanted Alfred Newman to use the cowboy melody “Red River Valley” in many of his Westerns, so Randy Newman wrote this piece as a tribute to both his uncle and the song. It’s a sentimental tune that evokes the mood of the original, but with a melodic turn that only he would write. Some of Newman’s phrases are moving, but also witty—even funny. I liked, too, how natural Cheng sounded playing this ironic movie-ranch tune. Her interpretation is more transparent and expressive than Newman’s. (Someone recorded him playing it on George Gershwin’s piano during a visit to the Library of Congress.)
Newman ends the piece with an allusion to his uncle’s “20th Century Fox Fanfare,” making it both less and more sentimental. It’s a lovely moment. Unlike in the Boulez, we must recognize the motif, hear its chords as sentimental, and register its melodic turn as witty. Its complexity isn’t a matter of trembling air, but of meaning. At the Wende Museum, Gloria Cheng gave us both at once.
