Reviews

 

BRESNICK Willie’s Way.1 Falling.2 Ballade.3 Three Choral Songs.4 Every Thing Must Go5 • 1, 3Lisa Moore (pn); 2Abigail Nims (sop); 2Wei-yi Yang (pn); 3Ashley Bathgate (vc); 4Marguerite Brooks, cond; 4Yale Camerata; 5Prism Saxophone Quartet • ALBANY TROY1184 (59:39)

If Martin Bresnick’s reputation as a leading American composer hasn’t quite reached the lofty heights of an Adams or Corigliano, among performers he is widely regarded as one of the best. He has produced music at a high level for many years, and is sought out by many a performer eager to add engaging, durable works to their repertoire.

His new disc on Albany is exhibit A: five superb pieces that span nearly two decades and give a fine picture of the consistency of his output. He isn’t exactly a “pan-stylist,” but his palette is broad and inclusive, and listeners are likely to pick up references to minimalism, smatters of dense chromaticism, consonant harmonies, and hints of rock, among others. The title work, Every Thing Must Go for saxophone quartet (the most recent on the disc, from 2007), is a good example, beginning with open harmonies that quickly fill it with sober minor-key sonorities and move soon to roving, good-natured ramblings. The second of three movements is a scherzo of sorts, bubbling, effervescent, and motoric, but with lyrical gestures that soar above the bustle. Consonant harmonies occasionally surrender to brief dissonance, and the movement ends with a slow, hair-raising ascension. There is a program of sorts that involves gestures of farewell to musicians the composer has known, and the elegiac strains of the last movement are genuinely touching.

For all of the observations critics make regarding new trends in compositional style, skilled and imaginative development of minimal materials always seems to remain relevant. The 10-minute piano piece Willy’s Way from 2006 is a fine example of Bresnick’s keen developmental prowess. Much of the piece revolves around variations on two traditional alternating chords, often in rather bravura, even romantic style, derived from a Willie Dixon blues tune. I’m not entirely convinced about the value of percussive and vocal interruptions that intervene late in the piece, but as a whole it is a terrific vehicle for the splendid pianist Lisa Moore.

Ballade is aptly described by the composer as a “song without words” for cello and piano that is “intended to evoke the austere, autumnal world of Brahms.” There is both a peculiar blend of lyricism and cragginess to the cello line as well as a thickness in the left hand of the piano that make the homage quite clear and compelling. Three Choral Songs and song cycle Falling show him to be equally at home with the voice as he is with instrumental forces. The texts are rendered with exceptional emotional resonance and poetic clarity.

The performances are of the highest rank. The Prism Quartet continues to build an impressive repertoire for saxophone foursome. Cellist Ashley Bathgate, pianist Wei-yi Yang, and mezzo Abigail Nims render Bresnick’s music with skill and conviction. The Yale Camerata under Marguerite Brooks sings with clarity, lyrical grace, and finely tuned dynamic differentiation.

- Michael Cameron
This article originally appeared in Issue 34:1 (Sept/Oct 2010) of Fanfare Magazine.

 

BRESNICK Willie’s Way.1 Falling.2 Ballade.3 Three Choral Songs.4 Every Thing Must Go5 • 1, 3Lisa Moore (pn); 2Abigail Nims (sop); 2Wei-yi Yang (pn); 3Ashley Bathgate (vc); 4Marguerite Brooks, cond; 4Yale Camerata; 5Prism Saxophone Quartet • ALBANY TROY1184 (59:39)

Martin Bresnick (b. 1946) by now is no stranger to these pages. He’s one of the most substantial composers of his generation, and he also has the distinction through his teaching gig at Yale of having mentored and launched a host of young composers who have moved on to brilliant careers. Aside from his own music, the history of late 20th/early 21st-century American music may well single him out as the Boulanger of the era.

But as said, to his own work, this disc is a collection of old and new works, in a sense a gathering of pieces that don’t fall into any single easy category (unlike the still-impressive Opere della Music Povera, a cycle by which the composer planted his aesthetic flag firmly for all to see). Willie’s Way (2006) is a solo piano work based on the blues song Spoonful by Willie Dixon. It’s a reworking of the Fantasia on a Theme of Willie Dixon from 2001 (released on New World 80635-2, and which I reviewed in Fanfare 20:3). I like this version better. The piece is an artful blend of Brahms and the blues, and Bresnick subjects the changes to every twist possible to wrest as much harmonic richness and diversity as possible. At first I thought it perhaps a little too long for its materials, but I changed my mind by the second listening. The piece also feels like an homage to Rzewski, in both its popular source and the extended techniques (clapping, stomping, singing) at the end. The composer’s muse, collaborator, and life partner, Lisa Moore, is magisterial in her interpretation.

There’s another blues-tinged work on the program, and it’s a knockout. Falling is a much earlier work from 1993, a song cycle based on poems by Southerners David Bottoms and Katherine Stripling Byer. Its subject is the failings of the human heart, filtered through the experience of poor white folk that are usually relegated to talk-show mockery, and not given their proper dignity. This work does them justice, and more. The “bluesiness” is always powerful, dramatic, and never cheap. (One regret in this release is that there are no texts provided for either this work or the choral one. Abigail Nims’s enunciation is excellent, but it still helps to have a text at hand to get a sense of its “globality,” rather than trying to hold onto the words in memory alone.)

The 2004 Ballade for cello and piano is also Brahmsian in its tone and sound, and with what sounds like an underlying passacaglia structure. The 1988 Three Choral Songs (on Poems of Amichai) are scrupulously crafted a cappella miniatures, but they didn’t speak as deeply to me as the other works on the disc. But the 2007 Every Thing Must Go for saxophone quartet is fresh, playful, and moving at once. It seems something of a new avenue for the composer, as I hear a lot of “spectral” elements (i.e., overtone-based harmonies), most evident in the middle memorial movement to Bresnick’s teacher György Ligeti. It’s in three short movements, only about 13 minutes total; the Prism matches its demands with a marvelous purity of color and intonation.

Highly recommended, though again, there’s a slight feeling of a “sweeping up” of pieces not yet recorded, old and new. But nothing wrong with that, especially when it’s all so good. It does make me hungry, though, for a work or series of works comparable to the Opere. And I can’t help but regret there’s not more orchestral music out there from the composer. While this is probably partly choice—Bresnick has a very original sense of how to write grandly for chamber groupings—I also can’t help but think it’s also an index of the bone-headedness of so much of the American orchestral establishment. For meaty music of a Beethovenian or Brahmsian cast, without pandering pastiche, this is the man. Why don’t I know more than one piece in the Opere cycle? Maybe I’ve missed something out there?

- Robert Carl
This article originally appeared in Issue 34:1 (Sept/Oct 2010) of Fanfare Magazine.

Three Intermezzi: Music From the American Academy in Rome
Bridge records

Martin Bresnick's Three Intermezzi for solo cello are expertly performed by Ole Akahoshi. Returning to a more contemporary style, the short pieces are dramatic and demonstrate an array of sounds and timbral contrasts. The first piece is intense and somewhat aggressive, while the second takes on the form of a melodic dialogue which develops with the sense of a well-formed improvisation and a hint of jazz. Here the cello has a distinct voice; one which demands to be heard. The final movement is a virtuoso display, with impressive pizzicato effects and a wonderful sense of direction through the work. For me this is one of the highlights of the disc.

- Carla Rees, International Music Web

Composer Martin Bresnick brings unique brand of spirituality to Birmingham-Southern College
February 16, 2008

PHILLIP RATLIFF
For the Birmingham News

The ever-scrappy and ambitious music department at Birmingham-Southern College has brought several iconic composers and their music to Birmingham in recent years. On Friday night, BSC presented Martin Bresnick, a profoundly spiritual composer from New Haven, Conn. He was in Birmingham to oversee rehearsals, lead a master class and explain his music to the small but tuned-in audience.

Bresnick's particular brand of spirituality, with its emphasis on the beauty and connectedness of the natural world, recalls the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. The music of Charles Ives repeatedly came to mind throughout the nearly two-hour concert, although the surface of Bresnick's music is very different. It integrated diverse elements, including birdsong, American vernacular music, video derived from William Blake's eccentric poetry and engravings, and lots and lots of noise.

He complemented the regional underpinning with several references to southern creative traditions, including blues from the Mississippi Delta via the rock band, Cream, and texts by Georgia poets transformed into a mysterious song cycle for mezzo-soprano.

The vocal ensemble Sursum Corda sang two Sacred Harp-inspired Psalm settings. Despite the subtitles -- New Haven and Woodstock -- local audiences would surely place the craggy stylistic origins of the two choral works squarely in North Alabama.

Bresnick's musical materials include nods to minimalism and, through the occasional musical quote, post-modernism. Bresnick is undaunted by major and minor triads, pounding rhythmic repetitions and extended stays in a limited tonal realm. While this description suggests minimalists such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, Bresnick's emphasis on transformation of material and, perhaps more significantly, of mood, distinguishes him from those composers. His repeated and varied musical aphorisms recall Beethoven and his descendants. Indeed, the manner in which Bresnick marries musical gesture with spiritual content often brought the music of Gustav Mahler to mind, especially during the song cycle.

The roster of excellent performers included violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, who navigated brilliantly between sumptuous melodies and timbral noodlings, and mezzo-soprano Nadine Whitney, for whom Bresnick composed the cycle. Most impressive was Australian pianist and would-be contortionist Lisa Moore, who, while engaged in traditional ivory tickling, also slapped, stomped, vocalized and narrated.

A Maestro from the Bronx What influences have shaped Martin Bresnick's music? Just for starters: Melville, Blake, Rimsky-Korsakov, socialism, and Elvis.

March/April 2007 by Anne Midgette '86, for The Yale Alumni Magazine
Anne Midgette '86 covers classical music for the New York Times.

A whiff of the pejorative floats around the term "academic composer." This mythical individual is held responsible for many of the musical ills of the late 20th century: safely isolated in an ivory tower, forcing serialism on unwilling students, and smugly writing compositions that appeal only to a handful of other like-minded academics.

And Martin Bresnick is an "academic composer" in the most literal sense. He has been ensconced at the Yale School of Music for nearly 30 years and has taught generations of students. He has won just about every significant award that can be won by a composer, from the Rome Prize to a Guggenheim to the American Academy of Arts and Letters's first-ever Charles Ives Living award -- which frees a composer, for a span of three years' time, to concentrate exclusively on composing.

Where can this august figure be found when he's at home? Naturally, he frequents the place that best epitomizes the spirit of the academy with which he is affiliated.

That would be Naples Pizza.

Amid the dark tables, their rutted surfaces bearing the acne-like scars of generations of student carvings, before the fluorescent-lit display counter with its salads and pastries, in the pre-holiday half-emptiness of a December afternoon, Bresnick, 60, gray-haired, voracious, and utterly unaffected, holds court with the informal comfort of a student prince. He is voluble; he is boyish. He offers a visitor the bounty of Naples as if the restaurant belonged to him (regretfully noting the absence, this afternoon, of its signature rice pudding), ordering, for himself, "the usual" (antipasto). His large head is placed slightly forward on a strong upper body, with a hint of stiffness veiled beneath pure affability. He puts down his tray, sits, and uncorks a stream of conversation swirling with ideas and anecdotes, diverting into tributaries when a passing colleague greets him or when a student (knowing where to find him) comes in to confer about the library's inability to locate parts for one of Bresnick's string quartets.

A cell phone call. The parts are found. The student leaves. Refocus. Bresnick eats another pimiento and talks about Camille Pisarro, Harold Bloom, William Blake, Arte Povera, with a kind of down-to-earth enthusiasm that carries ideas from the realm of the intellectual elysium into the shirtsleeves world of real life. It's rare, among the nation-states of the academic world, to find someone with so much active, unpretentious interest in fields other than his own.

 

"The greatest pleasure in life is learning things I don't know."

"I'm not a Renaissance man, but I am a Renaissance boy," Bresnick jokes. "A Renaissance kid; let's not give it a gender. The greatest pleasure in life is learning things I don't know. It's one of the judgments I make about music, too. If I go to a concert and listen, I want to learn something that I don't know. I have a lot of regard for quality and craft. But if I hear something that teaches me something that I could not have thought, something I hadn't imagined could be: that's the greatest pleasure I know."

Classical music -- elitist? Think again.

In the music world, Bresnick has conventionally been known as a teacher. His name is often invoked like a biblical patriarch's, followed by a string of "begats": the long list of former students who have gone on to significant careers, writing music in a rainbow of dissimilar styles. Among them: Kevin Puts '96MusM, Marc Mellits '91MusM, Michael Torke '86Mus, Christopher Theofanidis '97MusAD, David Lang '83MusAM, Julie Wolfe '86MusM, and Michael Gordon '82MusM.

Bresnick is perhaps most often mentioned as the teacher of Lang, Wolfe, and Gordon, founders of a composers collective called Bang on a Can, which has become a pivotal force in New York's music scene. Breaking away from accepted academic tradition, mingling musical styles in a hip melange, the group has spawned a performing arm, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, that has helped redefine the chamber ensemble as something that can include a Javanese gamelan and an electric guitar, as well as a crackling energy that has young audiences practically dancing in the aisles. Many academic composers still regard Bang on a Can as too funky, too playful, too unserious. Not Bresnick.

"We do look at him as our guru," says Lang of his former teacher. "He's a really inspiring person."

But the label of "teacher" may have helped obscure Bresnick's significance as a composer. So it seemed, at least, when a few events around his 60th birthday last November propelled him into the spotlight.

 

For Bresnick's 60th birthday, the Yale School of Music presented a concert of his music.

First, Bang on a Can's recording label, Cantaloupe Music, issued a double-disc tribute, The Essential Martin Bresnick, that includes both a CD of assorted works and a DVD of his multimedia piece For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, a setting of a work by William Blake. (Bresnick wrote it for his wife, the pianist Lisa Moore, who is a former member of the All-Stars.) The album's cover bears a picture of a glass of water. It's a fine illustration for music that is clear, unadorned, and refreshing. What it doesn't get across, though, is the richness of the content, the levels of meaning and allusion worked into the solid architecture of Bresnick's pieces. A better metaphor might be a Shaker chair made of mahogany: something whose unassuming exterior belies both skilled craftsmanship and considerable, unexpected substance.

And the Yale School of Music's birthday present to Bresnick in December -- a concert of his music at Carnegie Hall's underground outpost, Zankel Hall -- opened many people's ears to his importance.

"What good music!" said the New York Times's chief critic, Anthony Tommasini '70, '72MM, happily, at intermission. His subsequent review called the pieces "vibrant," "varied," "wondrous," and "inspired." The concert, he said, "made clear that Mr. Bresnick is a major voice."

Its creator is happy at all the attention, and a little perplexed at the idea that he's somehow been laboring in obscurity all these years. "I won the Rome Prize when I was 29 years old," he points out. "I also won the Berlin Prize; I've won just about every prize that anybody out there was giving! What more do I do?" He lapses into Catskills-comic mode, throwing up his hands, thickening the New York accent: "Where did I go wrong?"

In the same joking vein, one could say that Bresnick's very beginnings in classical music were the result of a misunderstanding. As a boy, inflamed by the music of Elvis Presley, he pestered his parents for guitar lessons. For Russian immigrants in a housing cooperative in the Bronx, finding a guitar teacher wasn't simple; but his parents finally managed to locate one and set their son up with lessons. The young Bresnick learned to read music, mastered fingerings, and waited, every week, for the lesson in which he would learn how to play like Elvis. Instead, he learned Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and other highlights of the nineteenth-century symphonic repertory, which his teacher, also Russian, had transcribed for guitar. Bresnick was ultimately recruited to fill in as a member of his teacher's balalaika orchestra. You could say that his earliest musical ambitions were lost in translation.

 

Bresnick is very much a product of a certain period in New York.

Bresnick is very much a product of a certain period in New York. He attended the High School of Music and Art (of Fame fame), where his contemporaries included a host of people who went on to notable careers in music, from Leon Botstein, the conductor and president of Bard College, to Mark Snow (then Marty Fulterman), the film composer who wrote the music for The X-Files.

There were different influences at home. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, where he grew up, was an example of socialism in its purest form: a community where the grocery store was cooperatively owned and residents ran the day care, schools, and small businesses. Politics were expressed through lifestyle rather than party affiliation: one could defray one's living expenses by working at the grocery store. The ideology, as Bresnick describes it, was "basically kind of socialist anarchist, with cultural pretensions." (The cooperative, founded in 1927, still exists.)

"The nature of the socialism in my family, which had a strong political component, is part of who I am," Bresnick continues. "They were never members of the Communist Party; they weren't the red-diaper babies. They were always this independent group."

It's not hard to see the parallels in Bresnick's subsequent musical career. As a composer, Bresnick has remained independent of compositional schools and styles, following his own path. In liner notes to the CD Opere della Musica Povera (CRI Records), John Halle, a former Yale colleague who now teaches at Bard, observed that "his painstakingly engineered and elegantly constructed works represent a species of homage -- the selfless dedication of the master craftsman to his calling and its traditions, a Marxian commitment to value derived from labor over market-determined price."

 

"If I feel that someone is potentially interesting, I will make my way to them."

As a citizen of the music world, Bresnick has consistently played an active role in the communities of which he's a part. At Yale, this has meant encouraging his students and guiding undergraduate ensembles like "Sheep's Clothing," an eclectic group that mounted everything from chamber concerts to avant-garde performance happenings. It has also meant actively cultivating relationships with professors in other fields, such as historian Henry Louis Gates '73 (now at Harvard) and art historian Robert Farris Thompson '55, '65PhD. Bresnick is a frequent member of the Whitney Humanities Center, through which a rotating group of scholars from different fields meets regularly to exchange ideas. "If I feel that someone is potentially interesting, I will make my way to them," he says.

Seeing Harold Bloom walking down the street near Naples one afternoon, Bresnick accosted the English professor to tell him about the Blake project, which he was working on at the time. Bloom was sufficiently intrigued to listen to the piece and get involved. The DVD of "For the Sexes," in which Moore plays, speaks, and sings while images from Blake's book move across a screen behind her piano, also includes a 12-minute video clip of Bloom discussing Blake's work.

Another example of Bresnick's extra-musical frame of reference is his seminal Opere della Musica Povera, a cycle of 12 pieces that range in length from two minutes to twenty, in style from near-minimalism to choral harmony, and in scale from full orchestra to a trio of clarinet, viola, and piano. (The trio is the enigmatically named "***," one of Bresnick's best pieces.) The title of the works as a whole is a nod to the Arte Povera school in Italy, a group of artists who turned to elemental, simple materials to explore the relation between "art" and "reality."

"One of my favorite unknown Arte Povera works was by a guy I knew, named Paolo Icaro, in Italy," Bresnick says. "One day he saw that a little building of the tribunal was kind of falling down, so he went off and got his plaster and fixed this thing; and that was his piece [of art]. I thought, That's what I want my music to be. Make the community whole again. Instead of marble and bronze, how about using concrete and grass and sand. That's what I'm after in many of those pieces; they start from principles of a kind of music that is materially graspable, though in the piece it happens to be very complicated. Open the door: my house has many mansions. You come in that door, you may find a lot to do. I'm not going to put up a barrier. All I ask is that you pay attention."

 

Bresnick began composing while still in high school.

Bresnick began composing while still in high school. Matriculating at 16 at Hunter College, he transferred the next year to the University of Hartford. He was so active at the affiliated Hartt School of Music that, he says, the Hartford administrators lost track of him; when he returned to get an honorary award later in life, the institution seemed to believe he was a Hartt graduate. Yet a teacher at Hartt nearly got him to quit composing altogether: Arnold Franchetti, the resident eminence grise, whom Bresnick was finally allowed to study with his senior year.

"He was a teacher of the old school," Bresnick says: "very repressive. The first time I came in to his studio with my music, he clucked, 'Bresnick, Bresnick, what are you doing?' The second time: 'No, Bresnick, this is not right.' The next time, he erased my music and wrote in his own music. One of the next times, he said, 'Bresnick, how dare you bring me this abortion!' and he threw it on the floor. I was staggered by the hostility to what I was trying to do; I was ready to throw myself off a bridge. But a wonderful teacher named Edward Miller took me aside and said, 'Don't worry, don't lose heart; keep going; you've got something.'"

Years later, in the early '80s, Bresnick was at a concert where a piece of his and of Franchetti's were on the program. "I liked his music," he explains. "It was always lyrical, charming. I sought him out in the lobby and said, 'Maestro Franchetti, it's wonderful to see you again and I really enjoyed your piece.' He was very old; he could hardly see. He peered up at me and said, 'Bresnick, Bresnick, I hate your music; it's terrible!'"

Franchetti "was a very good example of the teacher I decided never to be," Bresnick said. The teacher he wanted to be appeared after he got to Stanford for graduate school, where John Chowning introduced him to computer music and to the works of the composer who was to become his towering idol -- and later his teacher -- the Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti (best known to many for "Lux Aeterna" and other pieces that were used on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey).

 

At Yale, almost every composition student works with every teacher.

Though Bresnick's music sounds nothing like Ligeti's, they share an awareness of the importance of tradition, and both seek to synthesize the musical past and a unique voice of the present. "He was probably the greatest composer of the era," Bresnick says. "And as a teacher he set a standard that was bracing." After a first failed attempt -- Bresnick won a Fulbright to work with Ligeti in Vienna, only to arrive there and find that Ligeti had won a grant to go work somewhere else -- Bresnick was able to study with him after Chowning managed to lure him to California for a year. Bresnick's identification with Ligeti speaks to the bond between teacher and student -- a bond, avers David Lang, Bresnick's student, that has special strength in the field of music. "Like medieval stone carvers, you can tell which guild you belong to," Lang says. "We trace our lineage back."

At Yale, almost every composition student works with every teacher, so Bresnick by default works with nearly every composer who comes through the School of Music; it's not altogether surprising that he's had some successful proteges. But few teachers enjoy such widespread admiration for their pedagogic abilities.

"The thing that's great about Martin is that he really wants you to be better than you are," Lang says, "no matter where you are or what you are doing. If you are writing beautiful music, he wants it to be better beautiful music. His view is that 'If I ask the right question, your eyes will open a little and you will do something one inch smarter.' He found a way to make lots of different people think lots of different kinds of things. Like a good psychoanalyst, he wants the little things that you do to be examined. I think that's the reason his approach works on so many different kinds of music and people."

Of course, Bresnick has had a very good practical reason to keep his teaching skills in good shape. The Yale School of Music, like Yale's other art schools, doesn't offer tenure. After all these years, and even with his recent promotion to an endowed chair -- Bresnick is now the Charles T. Wilson Professor of Music -- he is still an adjunct professor on a five-year contract.

Yet an advantage of Yale's music school is that, unlike Stanford or Harvard, there is a whole pool of performers the composition department can draw on. "Over the years, I've gotten to know some incredible students, whom I not only teach in classes, but then they play the pieces," he says. "One of the great things about working here is it's like Esterhazy," the summer castle of Haydn's patron, where the composer's new works were played by the house orchestra. "I get to try things with the students who are not jaded; they're not burned out yet."

Burnout is an oft-cited ailment of academic composers, too. But Bresnick appears to have staved it off -- not least by continuing to focus, at least part of the time, on creating vital new work. "Pine Eyes," a two-act puppet version of "Pinocchio." "Grace," a double concerto for two marimbas inspired by a Kleist essay. "My Twentieth Century," a poignant work in which the musicians take turns speaking aloud the verses of a simple poem citing a range of specific, personal events from a century now over.

"I feel it's more important to be ambitious for your music," says the composer, "than to be ambitious for yourself."

Joshua Kosman, Gramophone, February 2007

Martin Bresnick has devoted his career to two complementary and intertwined pursuits: composing music of wiry, tender-hearted eloquence, and training a younger generation to write brilliant music that sounds nothing like it. But because his success as a teacher has been so pronounced – the roster of his students includes some of the most prominent composers now in their 30s and 40s, most notably the founding directors of New York’s influential Bang on a Can Festival – the scope of his own achievement as a composer has been unfairly obscured.

Now that imbalance is beginning to right itself. A few weeks after his 60th birthday in November, Bresnick was feted with a retrospective concert of his music at Zankel Hall in New York. And Cantaloupe Records, Bang on a Can’s recording label, has issued “The Essential Martin Bresnick,” a captivating CD/DVD set that offers a concise glimpse of some of his most characteristic and telling chamber music.

The cumulative effect of all this activity is to shine a spotlight on a composer whose importance is all too easy to misjudge. His music is almost impossible to pigeonhole stylistically: It can be knotty and atonal at one juncture, lushly harmonic the next. Romantic melody, minimalist phase patterns and gritty rhythmic explosions coexist or make way for one another as the demands of a given work dictate.

And the range of students who have come under his wing at Yale, where he has taught since 1976 – first in the undergraduate music department and for the last 25 years in the School of Music – is just as multifold. In addition to Bang on a Can founders David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, they include Evan Ziporyn, Michael Torke, Christopher Theofanidis, Kevin Puts and many more. If there is no very obvious Bresnick style, there is no Bresnick school either.

What binds all these disparate strands together is Bresnick’s own combination of intellectual depth and cheerful practicality. An expansive thinker with a wide knowledge of both Western and non-Western art, literature and philosophy, he thrives in the heady atmosphere of an Ivy League university. But at the same time, he takes a pragmatic view of the nuts and bolts of composing. With his warm, avuncular demeanor and bushy hair and beard, he’s like some kind of Jewish-anarchist Hans Sachs – at once a scholar and a cobbler – exploring the techniques of creation and passing them along to a new generation.

“A composer,” he says with the tone of someone delivering a credo, “is someone who takes the problems that are cast up, and solves those problems.”

That ad-hoc approach to composition – craftsmanlike, sensible, free of dogma or doctrine – is a legacy of the late György Ligeti, who taught Bresnick during his student days in Vienna and became a powerful role model.

“Ligeti saw every ism, every stylistic trend or fashion, as a cage,” Bresnick says. “He tried very hard to find an individual response to each situation from his own imagination. He rejected being a modernist or even post-modernist avatar.”

Bresnick also attributes his flexibility to his experience as a composer of film scores, including the sound track for the 1980 documentary “The Day After Trinity.”

“When you work on a film score, you have to quickly characterize in music something you see on screen. You have to surrender the prudishness of stylistic restraint: If you feel like you can only write music that reflects some stylistic twitch or quirk, you quickly learn to let that go.

“So I’m intrigued by the challenge of dealing with particular compositional circumstances. But I believe to my roots that when and if anyone wants to look back over my work, they will find a very consistent approach in the interior of the work. If I have to fight a fire, I wear a red jacket and a fireman’s hat; if I’m walking a picket line I wear jeans and carry a sign; and if I’m going to a party I wear a suit. But I’m still the same guy.”

Among the common threads underlying much of Bresnick’s work are a lean, sinewy approach to form and a directness of expression that grows out of his economical language.

“He builds structures the way Bartók did, with rigor and simplicity,” says Lang. “His music has no ornament, by which I mean that you never get to a moment where there’s a beautiful flute trill and you think, ‘That’s only there because it’s so nice to hear a beautiful flute trill.’ Everything is there to further the argument.”

“Behind the music is this Beethovenian rigor,” says Theofanidis. “You struggle to get where you’re going, and although unexpected moments of grace come up, it’s the struggle itself that is fundamental.”

The music on the Cantaloupe set bears out these observations. The String Quartet No. 2, named “Bucephalus” after the steed ridden into battle by Alexander the Great, gets an athletic, edgy rendition by the Flux Quartet, balanced by the tenderer, more translucent Piano Trio as performed by the Jupiter Trio. Two instrumental works inspired by Kafka – the plangent “Bucket Rider” and the ferocious “Be Just!” – sound unusually vibrant as performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. On the DVD is “For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise,” Bresnick’s incantational setting of the poetry of William Blake, in a riveting performance by his wife, the pianist and speaker Lisa Moore.

Practical responsiveness to the situation at hand is part of what makes Bresnick such a skillful teacher as well.

“Studying with Martin isn’t like the European modernist teachers, where there’s one way to compose and they show you what it is,” says Lang. “It’s more like therapy, in that he’ll listen to you and then ask you the question that makes you think one inch farther than you’ve thought so far. He’s not telling you what to write, but asking you to think more carefully about what you were doing already.”

Bresnick is philosophical about the fact that he is better known as an educator than as a composer.

“Teaching was originally something I had to do to earn a living,” he says. “When I was emerging, the idea of an independent composer who didn’t have a trust fund was hard to imagine, and given my background and my parents’ concerns about music, I had to convince everyone that I could make a living. Teaching came more naturally to me than being an insurance executive.

“And now that these people have become well known and are claiming me as their teacher, what am I going to say, No? Should I get petulant and push it away and try to deny what everyone can see?”

Still, he declines to be classed with such non-composing pedagogues as Nadia Boulanger. His model, he says, is the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, who was an important influence on a younger coterie of artists, including Gauguin, Degas and van Gogh, while continuing to produce his own work – and, Bresnick notes with glee, a Jewish anarchist to boot.

Bresnick was born and raised in a union-based cooperative housing project in the Bronx, the child of working-class Yiddish speakers. His father was an accountant for a beer distributor, his mother a Russian-born garment worker who took in needlework to help make ends meet. Left-wing politics was a natural part of his birthright, and it remains evident in the titles and themes of many of his works today – most notably “Opere della Musica Povera” (“Works of a Poor Music”), an umbrella title for a cycle of some dozen works characterized by deliberately restricted means.

“The composer Robert Beaser once said that it wouldn’t be a piece of Bresnick’s without the word ‘work’ or ‘worker’ in the title,” he says with a laugh. “And it’s true that my music is often concerned with the insulted, the oppressed, the downtrodden – the Sancho Panzas rather than the Don Quixotes, the horse of Alexander the Great rather than Alexander himself.”

Music was not a prominent part of the household, but there were a few records around, and Martin gravitated to them right away.

“My parents noticed early on that was I memorizing things like the ‘Nutcracker’ Suite, and I would sing along with the records. As soon as the music started, I’d be wandering around like a Sufi in a trance; they figured out that that was the way to shut me up.”

He began taking guitar lessons at 7, hoping to emulate Elvis Presley. But his parents had unwittingly entrusted him to a local teacher whose goal was to enlist him in a guitar and balalaika orchestra; instead of learning to play “Hound Dog” and “Johnny B. Goode,” he says, he kept winding up with “Sheherazade.” Still, he forged on, learning to play piano, flute and oboe, and entering New York’s High School of Music and Art at 13. Before that, though, he’d already felt composition beckoning to him.

“I must have been about 11 years old, and I remember one day listening to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, and thinking, ‘I know what this is about, I know what this means.’ I didn’t need Leonard Bernstein to explain things to me. I just felt that I got it – and then I felt a sense of profound responsibility that if I get it, I should do it. And so I began writing things down.”

After studies at the University of Hartford in Connecticut and in Vienna, Bresnick enrolled in the graduate program at Stanford, where he studied with the electronic music pioneer John Chowning. He arrived in California in the fall of 1967 – just after the Summer of Love.

“The world was exploding – the computer, the politics, everything. I was playing guitar in a rock band that used to get called in to play whenever they occupied a building. In the daytime I was a responsible graduate student, and at night I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Cream, and experimenting with whatever drug I could get my hands on.”

Bresnick taught at Stanford for a few years before relocating to Yale, where he tried to recreate some of that aura of excitement on a musical landscape that at the time was fairly constrained. He helped found Sheep’s Clothing, an undergraduate ensemble that staged all-night marathons to perform works by Messiaen, Terry Riley and Frederic Rzewski. He inspired countless music students (including me) with curiosity about new and unusual fare. Except for the years between 1998 and 2001, when he was the first recipient of the Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he has been there ever since.

At 60, Bresnick takes a more philosophical view of music and its role in the world than he did as young man. “I think it’s very helpful to know that you cannot do everything. You cannot remake the history of the world or of music. You can make some beautiful things and leave them for people to take consolation from, but the world will go how it will go.

“Last month I was teaching an analysis seminar on Schumann’s ‘Mondnacht,’ and I thought how privileged we are to live in a world that has such a piece in it. And my hope is that maybe someday someone will be able to say that about my work.”

Joshua Kosman is the classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.


Critic's Notebook by Alex Ross
The New Yorker | Goings on About Town
Issue of 2006-12-11

RAGS TO RICHES
Martin Bresnick is one of the great pragmatists in contemporary music, a composer who will use any sound as long as it speaks vividly and makes narrative sense. He is also a great teacher of composition, able to guide students who are moving in directions different from his own. Over many years at Yale, he has taught the members of the pop-inflected Bang on a Can collective—Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe—and a hundred or more others of all persuasions. Bresnick just turned sixty, and a mini-festival is in progress. The Cantaloupe label, Bang on a Can’s boutique operation, has released “The Essential Martin Bresnick”; Yale musicians are presenting an all-Bresnick concert at Zankel Hall on Saturday night; and two pieces from “Opere della Musica Povera” (“Works of a Poor Music”), his dazzlingly varied evening-length cycle of vocal and instrumental works, will appear on a Bang on a Can All-Stars program at Zankel on Tuesday. The last title has an ironic ring: Bresnick creates a rich world in even the humblest forms.

 

The Jewish Week 12/08/2006
The Teacher Appears: Tribute to Martin Bresnick by his students marks not only his 60th birthday but also 25 years of ‘giving back’ through teaching.
by George Robinson - Special To The Jewish Week

Please don’t think that Martin Bresnick is having a “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” moment.

Sure, the acclaimed composer and teacher is celebrating his 60th birthday this month with a series of concerts and the release of a new CD of his music, performed by a gang of his former students, centered on the Bang on a Can All-Stars and his long-time academic home, the Yale School of Music.

But he’s not the “grand old man” nearing retirement and taking a retrospective look back at a parade of his students through a Vaseline-coated lens of memories.

“Well, there is a little bit of that,” Bresnick says, leaning back in the booth in a midtown diner where he has been sampling the apple pie. “But I don’t think of myself in that role. For most of my teaching career I haven’t been that much older than my students. It’s only recently that students stopped calling me Martin. I’m not an authority figure, and our work revolves around a sense of communal discovery.”

Bresnick, who has been on the Yale faculty for 25 years, likes to cite a famous Zen koan about teaching: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” But he is also highly attuned to the teacher-student interplay. He cites as an example his own studies with the great composer György Ligeti (coincidentally, also a Jew).

“He was one of the greatest composers of our era,” Bresnick says. “You learn from what he said about things, but also from what he did. I had that as an example. It’s a way of saying, ‘I am a real composer and people who study with me know that.’”

And it is as a composer that Bresnick wants to be known. He doesn’t downplay the importance of teaching. On the contrary, it is an integral part of the ethos in which his Yiddishist, socialist family raised him.

“Teaching for me has always had a strong social component,” he says. “It’s part of giving back. I came out of a working-class family in the Bronx and was given a tremendous opportunity by others. I had it ingrained in me that you serve and have to share.”

That’s a lesson he was taught growing up in the Amalgamated Co-ops.

“I had a very devoted secular Jewish upbringing,” Bresnick says. “My family were dedicated Yiddishists, I was sent to the Arbeiter Ring [Workmen’s Circle] elementary school. My family ran the gamut politically from anarchist to liberal Democrats. I can still read Yiddish, and my aunt, Phylis Berk, is a well-known Yiddish singer. My mother, at 85, is still a professional storyteller who travels around the country talking about life in the shtetl.”

It was a wonderful milieu in which to grow up, but not so hot for learning classical music, he admits.

“When I was little my parents had very few classical records,” Bresnick recalls. “I could memorize very quickly. Somewhere out there is a disc with me singing snippets of ‘Barber of Seville’ and ‘The Nutcracker,’ which were the two classical records they had at first. But they recognized that I had a talent, and they got me a couple of records when they could. The first time I ever heard a woodwind quintet was when I saw one live at the age of nine on a school trip. I was completely dumbfounded by the bouquet of timbres.”

It was the beginning of a career and a calling.

“I would listen to a Beethoven symphony when I was 7 and felt that I understood what was intended,” he says. “I had some comprehension of the point of [writing] a symphony. And I felt, ‘I can do it too.’ I think I understood that it had something to do with what it means to be a human being.

“Music for many people at that age is a wonderful refuge. It offers them an ordered world. As a composer, you are making a world.”

On the other hand, Bresnick was also participating in the world around him. As a teenager, he played rock guitar, graduated from the High School of Music and Art at 16 “as the youngest beatnik ever,” he adds, laughing, and was in grad school on the West Coast by 20. He saw Jimi Hendrix live, still admires Cream as “a great chamber-music group,” and gigged as a working musician.

Even today, Bresnick “listens to everything,” and his own compositions have a uniquely American eclecticism.

“It’s Ivesian,” he says, citing the great American maverick, Charles Ives. “It’s totally democratic; everybody’s got a right to belly up to the table and contribute.”

Bresnick is a composer who can juxtapose the repetitive structures of minimalism with Stravinskian harmonies, who can use a Willie Dixon blues riff as the jumping-off point for a Brahmsian chamber piece, who can write movingly for marimba and orchestra.

If you ask him if there is any musical style that he would reject out of hand, he smiles and says, “I’m ready to accept almost any influence into my domain. My ‘border guards’ may ask them to show their passport first, though.”

He admits to excluding only one major late-20th-century movement.

“I’m not that interested in conceptual art,” he says. “Most of it has revealed itself to be poorer conceptually than any physically-based art. I believe in the line from William Carlos Williams, ‘No ideas but in things.’ I like the pleasures of the physical world, and if I can embody something in the world of music, that’s good enough.”

Above all, he wants to be known as a composer first and foremost.

“No question about it,” he says emphatically. “I’ve never thought of myself any other way. I love teaching and I’m glad to be well-regarded as a teacher, but I have no doubt of my own self-identity.”

Anyone who hears Bresnick’s music, live or on disc, will agree. n

“Martin Bresnick at 60: Yale School of Music Celebrates the Composer and Beloved Pedagogue,” a concert of Bresnick’s work will take place on Dec. 9 at 7:30 p.m. at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall (57th St. and Seventh Ave.). For information call CarnegieCharge at (212) 247-7800 or go to www.carnegiehall.org.

“The Essential Martin Bresnick” featuring the Bang on a Can All-Stars, is available on the Cantaloupe Records label.

 

The New York Times, December 12, 2006
Music Review | 'The Essential Martin Bresnick': Yale Steps Beyond the Campus to Pay Tribute to a Composition Professor

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Having a teaching post at a major university can provide security and collegial stimulation for a composer. Martin Bresnick has used his position as a composition professor at the Yale School of Music to good benefit, nurturing hundreds of students who have moved in all directions, while finding time and space to create a catalog of vibrant, varied and respected works.

The downside of being based at a university is that a composer can become a little sequestered from the larger public. So for New York concertgoers “The Essential Martin Bresnick: A 60th Birthday Retrospective” at Zankel Hall on Saturday night was long overdue. The program was presented by the Yale School of Music.

Mr. Bresnick has had his share of successes in New York, with pieces played by, among other ensembles, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and, just last Tuesday, the Bang on a Can All-Stars. But the concert Saturday night, with performances of six inspired works lovingly played by students and faculty from Yale, made clear that Mr. Bresnick is a major voice.

In “B.’s Garlands,” for eight cellos, the acuteness of Mr. Bresnick’s ear for modernistic harmony and texture was unmistakable. The piece, which he conducted, begins with a quietly organic mass of tremulous sound. Yet shards of color, strands of counterpoint and precisely spaced harmonies come shooting through the mists of sound. After this, the Yale Camerata, a choir of about 65 voices, gave a sensitive performance of Three Choral Songs, mystical yet harmonically astringent settings of texts on themes of pain, comfort and war by the 20th-century Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Mr. Bresnick has kept the title of his 1997 trio for clarinet (David Shifrin), viola (Jesse Levine) and piano (Lisa Moore) a secret. He calls it ***. True to its cryptic nontitle, the mood of the work is deceptively stately. Even when things turn agitated, and descending cascades of piano sonorities play against fidgety duos for viola and clarinet, the elusive music somehow remains eerily calm.

In “Grace,” a 20-minute concerto for two marimbas (Robert van Sice and James Deitz) and chamber orchestra, extended passages of halting rhythms and quizzical restraint are broken up with bursts of precise and telling gestures.

“For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise” was a tour de force for Ms. Moore, the pianist for whom it was written. As she played music of unnervingly repetitive chords, staggered rhythms and delicate filigrees, Ms. Moore also spoke and sometimes sang lines from the poet William Blake about a man’s progress through life. The music precisely accompanied powerfully simple computer animations of Blake’s drawings prepared by Puppetsweat Theater. (A DVD of a performance of this work is available on “The Essential Martin Bresnick,” a two-disc recording recently released on the Cantaloupe Music label.)

In “My Twentieth Century” Mr. Bresnick again asks musicians to do more than play their instruments. As this wondrous chamber sextet proceeds, with music of melodic riffs and pungent harmonies, the players by turn put aside their instruments to recite a wistfully reflective poem by Tom Andrews with lines like: “I wasted three years on geometry in the twentieth century”; and “My brother died in the twentieth century.” That even the musicians with foreign accents entered so readily into the performance was a testimony to their trust in their teacher’s artistry.

 

Happy Jazzy, Operatic, Symphonic Birthday, Dear Teacher
By STEVE SMITH, New York Times, December 3, 2006

CONSIDER this list of prominent American composers: Michael Torke, Stewart Wallace, Daniel Kellogg, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Christopher Theofanidis. On the surface they seem to have little in common apart from nationality; their music ranges from plush symphonic works and operas to rock-infused post-Minimalist pieces.

Add to that list Marco Beltrami, who has provided scores for lucrative feature films like “I, Robot” and the “Scream” series, and Jack Perla, who won the Thelonious Monk competition for jazz composers in 1997. Now add literally dozens more.

What all these composers share is a teacher: Martin Bresnick, the coordinator of the composition department at Yale, where he has taught since 1976. That extraordinary roster of successful former pupils sometimes overshadows Mr. Bresnick’s own reputation as a composer, with noteworthy commissions and estimable awards to show for his efforts. A calendar on his Web site (martinbresnick.com) documents the many performances his work receives.

Mr. Bresnick turned 60 last month, and the occasion will be commemorated this week by two concerts at Zankel Hall.

On Tuesday evening two of his works will be included in a program by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the house band of the eclectic collective Bang on a Can, founded by his former students Mr. Gordon, Mr. Lang and Ms. Wolfe. Both works appear on a new CD, “The Essential Martin Bresnick,” recently issued on Bang on a Can’s label, Cantaloupe.

On Saturday the Yale School of Music will devote an entire evening at Zankel to Mr. Bresnick’s music, including choral songs, a concerto for two marimbas, a multimedia piece for solo pianist and other works less easily categorized.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a composer who teaches,” Mr. Bresnick said recently from Kalamazoo, Mich., where he had just supervised the recording of one of his works. “I never thought of it any other way. The tail has been pinned on me because I do it pretty well, so I certainly wouldn’t step back from it. But from the very beginning I formulated my life as a composer, and this was just one way of sustaining my abilities to work as a composer, because I didn’t have any other sources of money.”

Mr. Bresnick grew up in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers housing project in the Bronx. His musical proficiency became evident at a startlingly early age: he still owns recordings, made on the Atlantic City boardwalk, in which he sang Rossini’s aria “Largo al Factotum” and selections by Tchaikovsky at 2.

After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in New York and the University of Hartford, he came under the wing of John Chowning, a pioneer in computer music at Stanford. Mr. Chowning introduced him to music of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, an encounter that made a lasting impression.

Mr. Bresnick obtained a Fulbright fellowship to study with Ligeti in Vienna. On arrival he learned that Ligeti was departing for a fellowship of his own in Berlin. Instead Mr. Bresnick studied with Gottfried von Einem, a more conservative Austrian composer. But when he returned to Stanford as a graduate student, he arranged for Ligeti to serve there as a visiting professor in 1972.

“I ended up getting to know him in a personal and very direct way,” Mr. Bresnick said. “His remarkable insights into music and his nonideological approach to making new music were absolutely infectious.”

In Ligeti he had a working model for what he hoped to achieve in his own work.

“Ligeti said that he was interested in having a music that was neither modern nor postmodern,” Mr. Bresnick recalled. “It liberated me to think about a music which would not take up the cudgels of modernism, nor would it be a music that would use tonality in some kind of dreamlike collage system. I had to develop a method of composition that would be sufficiently free but also sufficiently integrally made so that it could support anywhere I wanted to go.”

“Opere Della Musica Povera,” a heterogeneous 12-part cycle that consumed Mr. Bresnick throughout the ’90s, suggests that what unites his works, regardless of idiom or duration, is an interest in exploring the evocative qualities of sound in music governed by rigorous structural rules.

Somehow formality and concision failed to constrain his potent imagination, especially when he treated subjects drawn from visual art, poetry and literature. On Tuesday the All-Stars will present two of those works, “The Bucket Rider” and “Be Just!,” both based on stories by Kafka.

“The beginning of ‘Bucket Rider’ is a solo melody on bass clarinet, written in such a way that it’s basically out of range,” said Evan Ziporyn, who plays clarinet in the All-Stars. In placing the melody at the highest extreme of the low-pitched instrument, he explained, Mr. Bresnick was evoking the essence of a wan character in the Kafka story of the same name.

“Because of where it is, there’s no way for it to not be fragile,” Mr. Ziporyn added. “It’s always going to feel like it’s right on the edge of disappearing.”

Mr. Ziporyn, 47, studied composition with Mr. Bresnick as a Yale undergraduate in 1980. He had earlier played clarinet in Mr. Bresnick’s new-music ensemble Sheep’s Clothing, whose occasional all-night concerts were precursors of Bang on a Can’s daylong marathons.

“There is no Bresnick sound other than in his music,” said Mr. Ziporyn, who now teaches composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But somehow he’s found a way to make people as aesthetically diverse as Michael Gordon on the one hand and Robert Beaser on the other, and a million miles in between, find their voice.”

A teacher’s mission, Mr. Ziporyn said, is to look at a young composer’s work and determine how best to improve the skills required to achieve it.

Kevin Puts, 34, a composer increasingly well known for his symphonic music, said, “I had come from a background of writing pieces in an intuitive, improvisatory way, where I’d sit at the piano and do whatever I thought should come next.” Mr. Bresnick, he said, emphasized the need for discipline, asserting that everything in a piece had to be logically justified.

“I remember my head spinning after my first lesson with him,” Mr. Puts said, “literally overwhelmed with the possibilities of what I could be doing with my piece.”

Mr. Bresnick credited Ligeti with providing an example in this pursuit as well.

“He was open to just about anything if it could be made with excellence and originality,” Mr. Bresnick said.

He laughed at the suggestion that he might be a late-20th-century equivalent to Nadia Boulanger, the French pedagogue who trained an earlier generation of American composers, including Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson and Elliott Carter. Instead Mr. Bresnick likened himself to Camille Pissarro, the 19th-century Impressionist painter who supported the work of a succeeding generation, including Monet and Manet, and was also influenced by them.

“Even after all these years I don’t see myself as somebody on a mountaintop with a bunch of tablets,” he said. “I see myself as one of the chosen, wandering in the desert. I’ve just been out there longer. When people come to me for teaching, I think they see that this is a person who has blood on his clothes and has been torn up a bit in his struggle, just as they struggle to achieve something.”

Record Review: The Essential Martin Bresnick
by Michael Brodeur
The Weekly Dig, Issue 8.47, Wed, November 22, 2006

The music of Martin Bresnick means the world to a lot of people—and absolutely nothing to even more. So smugly sits the irony of an “Essential” collection from a composer colossal enough to be invisible altogether. Kudos to Canteloupe for reining together such a powerful hour; this doesn’t feel like the standard hubris-fueled hype-horse that anyone who regularly receives press releases has grown used to. Bresnick’s music, evident even in this small sampling, is remarkably and entirely its own. Skewed and ordered, most beautiful when it seems to be tearing at its own body. The neighing entrance of the Bucephalus suite (1984), stirringly performed by the Flux Quartet, charges and rears, and strains against composure. The allure is that Bresnick may or may not be Alexander. The Jupiter Trio elegantly channels the fluid Trio for piano, violin and violoncello (1988)—even when it surges onto its own banks. The Bang on a Can All-Stars handle the often goofy BE JUST! (1995) and the eerie textures of The Bucket Rider (1995)


Time Out Chicago / Issue 91: Nov 23–Nov 29, 2006
Album review: The Essential Martin Bresnick (Cantaloupe)

From his perch at the Yale University School of Music, Bresnick taught the three artistic directors of Bang on a Can, the chamber ensemble that helped many composers unafraid of writing for electric guitar. They honor their prof here, whose wide range of expression and keen sense of structure will never go out of style.

The Chicago-based Jupiter Trio gives a kinetic reading of Bresnick’s Piano Trio. The descending lines of the final movement (marked “Ardently, Lost”) crash down with greater and greater force before splintering away. Eventually, violin, cello and piano are stabbing each other with chords, and sound truly lost.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars play two selections from Bresnick’s 12-part Opere della Musica Povera (Works of a Poor Music). These Kafka-inspired tales feature music marked by a poverty of spirit, as Bresnick calls it, taken as they are from tales of cruelty and woe. A doleful cello, vibraphone and clarinet conjure up the poor soul of The Bucket Rider, and the ghastly repetitions of BE JUST! represent pain-inducing needles.

A bonus DVD features pianist BoaC All-Star Lisa Moore (Bresnick’s wife) playing the captivating, baroque-dance–inspired For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise. BoaC even got Harold Bloom to discuss Blake for 15 minutes, and his droll commentary elucidates Blake’s poetry. The adventurous Flux Quartet whispers and sighs through Bresnick’s Second String Quartet, too. —Marc Geelhoed

Time Out New York / Issue 584: December 7–13, 2006
 Album review
Martin Bresnick: The Essential Martin Bresnick Flux String Quartet; Jupiter Trio; Bang on a Can All-Stars, Lisa Moore (Cantaloupe)

The arrival of the holiday season brings with it the overwhelming gluttony of boxed sets. A paired-down “essential” package, such as this two-disc sampling of Martin Bresnick’s oeuvre, comes as sweet relief. Though he was a student of Ligeti and teacher to a whole roster of compelling musical minds, Bresnick’s own work has flown largely under the radar. This release provides a neat catch-up package, dangled on the hook of the composer’s 60th birthday.

In a raw, tearing performance by the Flux String Quartet, Bresnick’s String Quartet No. 2, “Bucephalus,” exemplifies the power formal craftsmanship can have to ensnare the ear and make a visceral emotional connection. That impression is echoed, if more abstractly, in the Jupiter Trio’s reading of his Trio for piano, violin and cello, particularly in the relentless chords of the final movement. Taken together, these provide a satisfying if exhausting listening experience, one that raises the question of why Bresnick has not garnered greater attention.

The CD concludes with two selections from Bresnick’s Opere della Musica Povera, performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Inspired by Kafka stories, both pieces conjure the twisted intellectual landscape one might expect. The second disc, a DVD, features For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, a Blake setting for speaking pianist and projections, performed by Lisa Moore. —Molly Sheridan


Newmusicbox.org Pick

What's so essential about Martin Bresnick? Well, for starters he's impacted a few decades worth of composition students at Yale. If you subscribe to the old adage that those who can't do teach, let The Essential Martin Bresnick change your mind. The composer's String Quartet No. 2, here performed by the Flux Quartet, explores an idiosyncratic take on the medium. Harsh intervals morph into strange aggregates which, in turn, do an ugly-duckling-turning-into-the-swan routine. Bresnick manages to acculturate quite a few alien attributes into the traditional setting, making a hybrid weird enough to standout in the crowd—they never taught us that in school. - RN

 

Contemporary Classical from New World Records
by John Schaeffer

Martin Bresnick: My Twentieth Century
Artist: Various Artists Release Date: 2005

This is a very important record. Bresnick's reputation as a composition teacher has soared in recent years, following the startling success of his students, who include all three of Bang on a Can's founders. Bresnick's legacy as a teacher is secure, but it has threatened to overshadow the fact that Bresnick can just flat-out write. For proof, listen to his "Fantasia on a Theme by Willie Dixon," inspired by Cream's recording of the great American bluesman's "Spoonful." Using rock instruments like electric organ and guitar, as well as drum kit, it is evidence of an American composer whose ears are wide open -- and evidently have been for quite some time. Or, "Tent of Miracles," which uses overdubbed sax to wild effect -- but which is structured very much along the lines of an Indonesian gamelan's interlocking rhythms. The biggest piece is "Grace," essentially a double concerto for two marimbas, which simply should not work as well as it does.

 

My Twentieth Century review in Tempo Magazine, Autumn 2006

Martin Bresnick, professor of composition at the Yale School of Music, is well known as one of the major teachers of composition in the United States at the present, but his music, which is concentrated, elegant, rigorous, and quietly apollonian, is not as widely known as it should be.  Unlike his Trio and his wind quintet Just Time, which are abstract, absolute music, all of the works on this disc have important extra-musical connections; the majority have connections to various demotic sources and evoke, in one way or another, Bresnick’s family’s connection with politically progressive philosophies and movements early on in the twentieth century.  Grace, a concerto for two marimbas and orchestra, has a scenario related to the discussion in Heinrich Kleist’s essay “The Puppet Theatre” of consciousness, volition, and control in relation to mind and body.  The manner of the work is close to those mentioned above in its development of its compelling form out of clearly audible palindromic and inversional symmetries.  Tentof Miracles, for saxophone and recorded saxophones (the work can also be performed by four saxophones; in this performance the distinction between the “live” soloist and the pre-recording is imperceptible) portrays the futile and eventually abandoned efforts, by continual repainting, of a master artist in a novel by Brazilian author Jorge Amado to remove the smile from the face of a deadly jaguar in one of his paintings. Songs of the Mouse People for ‘cello and percussion evokes in five brief “arias” Kafka’s Josephine, the mouse diva.  Fantasia on a Theme by Willie Dixon, recalling a moment in Bresnick’s life in Palo Alto, California, in 1968, when “a recording I had never heard before...gradually invaded every neuron of my not so slowly blowing mind,” is a composed-out Jazz improvisation of ever increasing fantasy, complexity, and grandeur for piano and amplified instruments.  My Twentieth Century, a setting of a valedictory poem by Tom Andrews, written in his memory, in which the text is spoken by different players in the ensemble to the audience and to each other.  Although it begins as though it might be some sort of minimalist piece, and proceeds in that way for a while, it develops into something completely different, nostalgic, deep, and beautiful, and having a very specific relationship to its text.

Rodney Lister, Tempo, Autumn 2006

 

My Twentieth Century in Fanfare Jan / Feb 06
CD Review by RobertCarl

BRESNICK Grace.1 Tent of Miracles. 2 Songs of the Mouse People. 3 Fantasia on a Theme of Willie Dixon. 4 My Twentieth Century 5 • Robert van Sice (mmb); Kunihiko Kumori (mmb); Norichika Iimori, cond;6 Izumi Sinfonietta, Osaka;7 Taimur Sullivan (bar sax);8 Maya Beiser (vc);3 Steven Schick (perc);9 Povera Players10• NEW WORLD 80635 (62:02)

In Fanfare 24:5, I reviewed MartinBresnick’s magnificent cycle Opere della musica povera, a two-disc set (on the now defunct CRI) that witnessed the composer on a persistent and rigorous hunt—in search of his own voice. That project was successful; Bresnick (b. 1946) moved from shorter works that suggested etudes toward a practice to a set of full-blown masterpieces in the 1990s. Bresnick isn’t just one of the best composers of his generation, he’s one of the best we have right now of any age or style. The power of his music rests in the way he wrestles with primal materials to extract the maximum information and expression from them. This willingness, indeed desire, to work with the “poorest” (most basic) materials gives his work a Beethovenian heft.

This new release is a sort of appendix to that earlier release, encompassing works from 1984 to 2002. All the music is strong and engaging, but the results are a little more mixed in my view than in the cycle. Two works stand out as unqualified successes. Grace (2000) is a concerto for two marimbas and orchestra, and its distinguishing quality is that of weight. Just as the image and sound of the falling mallet shape the gestures of the work, so its sound is dominated by musical ideas that seem to fall into place. The work, like much of Bresnick’s, is a natural blend of the open harmonies and repetitive structures of minimalism, countered by the more formalistic and complex development one expects from modernist practice. Interestingly enough, it has a rather Coplandesque sound that never sounds facile or unduly imitative. Songs of the Mouse People (1999) is one of several works Bresnick has written inspired by Kafka (in this case the great story “Josephine the Mouse Singer”). This series of five cryptic movements for cello and percussion conveys the great mysterious and seething subterranean anguish of the source, on the verge of breaking forth even in the quietest moments (and when it does, as in Schick’s extraordinary vibraphone solo in the third movement, it’s an explosion indeed).

Only one work leaves me mostly cold, Tent of Miracles (1984) for saxophone with pre-recorded multiples of itself. It’s the earliest on the program, and while its composite sound of multiple baritone saxes is stunning, and it has a marvelous section in its middle made entirely of key-clicks, gathering momentum like a percussion parade at Carnival, nevertheless it has less drive and the sense of rock-solid form that distinguishes the best of Bresnick’s music.

The two other works are fascinating, in some ways wonderful, but each has one aspect which jostles my pleasure. Fantasia on a Theme of Willie Dixon (2001) is the sort of crossover work more commonly associated with Bresnick’s students of Bang on a Can (Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang). It takes an urban blues lick from Dixon’s great tune Spoonful (there’s an arrangement of the same piece for the Kronos Quartet, incidentally, by Steve Mackey on Nonesuch 79310) and subjects it to a classical treatment that’s anything but fussy—in fact, Bresnick discovers a real connection between the blues and Brahms, especially in the meaty piano-writing. The piece is rich and memorable, and my only reservation is its instrumentation. The more “popular” (drums, keyboard, and electric guitar) and “classical” (violin, bass clarinet, and vibraphone) instruments don’t seem to me quite from the same world; when they share material, it sounds jarringly different in the hands of each. That, of course, may be the point, but it still feels a little unbalanced. The confrontation of musical languages is already dramatic enough, and I rather wish I could hear either a pure R&B or chamber group playing the music.

Then there’s My Twentieth Century (2002), a setting for sextet of the eponymous poem by Tom Andrews. It begins with a driving Pétrouchka-like lick on the piano, and from there it never stops, rather like its title subject. The original aspect of the piece is the manner of the text’s delivery: the players declaim it as they are playing. There’s a great humor here, underlying many of the charming and funny lines in the poem (as well as the sad ones). It’s as though the voice of Everyman is speaking, just in different accents and genders. My only complaint is in the piece’s recorded presentation. The players’ voices have been recorded separately and then are mixed in. The result is a little like a video piece where individual faces fade in and out over the performance to speak. With headphones, it’s quite distracting; over loudspeakers, it still sounds artificial to me. I’m assuming that the actual performance practice requires the players to speak in real time, and even though there are inherent acoustical problems with this, somehow I feel it would add to the music’s wit and humanism to record it this way, even if there were more rough edges or even less audible passages. But others can legitimately see this from exactly the opposite viewpoint, I think.

Even if I have some reservations, I’d rather listen to Bresnick on an off day than most composers on a good one. And in fact, anything I find problematic about this music comes from one of its great strengths—its willingness to take risks. Bresnick is not content to write music in its hermetic chamber. Even though his craft is scrupulous, he wants music to get out into the rough-and-tumble of life, and if it gets mussed up, so be it. One would expect no less of a composer who references in this disc Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Kafka, Jorge Amado, Willie Dixon, and Tom Anderson for each of its respective pieces! Bresnick is an intellectual composer, but not a cerebral one; he values the visceral too much. And in this mix lies the strength of his music.

This remains a highly recommended disc, even if it is something of an appendix to the Musica povera cycle. The sound is clean and immediate. All the performances are superb; that of Beiser and Schick beggars description. The excellent Povera Players are an assemblage of the composer’s friends and colleagues, and since our headnote policy doesn’t allow for listing the individuals of a named ensemble, here they are. In Fantasia on a Theme of Willie Dixon: Lisa Moore piano; Meighan Stoops, bass clarinet; John Ferrari, drum set; Jason Treuting, vibraphone; Marija Ilic, keyboard; Mark Stewart, electric guitar; and Jeanine Wynton, violin. In My Twentieth Century: Patti Monson, flute; Jo-Ann Sternberg, clarinet; Lisa Moore, piano; Timothy Fain, violin; Marka Gustavsson, viola, Ole Akahoshi, cello; and Ransom Wilson, conductor.

- Robert Carl, Fanfare

 

American Record Guide Jan / Feb 06
Review of My Twentieth Century

BRESNICK: Grace; Tent of Miracles; Songs of the Mouse People; Willie Dixon Fantasia; My 20th Century
Maya Beiser, vc; Taimur Sullivan, sax; Robert von Sice, Kunihiko Komori, marimba; Steven Schick, perc; Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka / Norichicka Iimuri; Povera Players/ Ransom Wilson
New World 80625 – 62 minutes

This is a collection of chamber works by influential Yale professor Martin Bresnick (b 1946). Bresnick is probably best known as the teacher of Bang on a Can founders Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, along with many of their colleagues; there is a striking mutual influence to be found in much of the music of this engaging release. (Bresnick himself studied with Ligeti in Germany in the 60s, but there isn’t much of Ligeti here, at least in the most recent pieces.)

The program opens with Grace  (2000), a double concerto for two marimbas and chamber orchestra inspired by the essay ‘The Puppet Theater’ by Heinrich von Kleist. The essay deals with the mind-body dialectic through the metaphor of marionettes, which depend on human intervention for their illusory volition. Human intervention notwithstanding, the puppets possess an innate grace, and it’s proposed that artists (dancers in this case) should strive to emulate the puppet’s passive but willing demeanor.

The three-movement concerto casts the wooden puppets as marimbas, expressing their thoughts the best they can using the limited vocabulary at their disposal, here restricted to the intervallic gene of the minor third. The outer movements of the piece are jazzy, laid-back mechanical dances, with the orchestra commenting on and sometimes becoming one with the players. The romantic middle movement brings to mind Copland: mellow, bluesy, and unashamedly tonal in its warmly expressive melodies. The work is friendly and absorbing, and it’s no surprise that it would appeal to Asian performers in its refined sensibility (a group from Osaka performs it here). Unmistakably American in its dialect, it’s still not hard to hear Stravinsky (or at least Nadia Boulanger) hovering approvingly in the background.

The earlier (and less appealing) Tent of Miracles (1984), for multi-tracked baritone saxophone, takes as its point of departure a story by Brazilian writer Jorge Amado where a painter, attempting to portray a jaguar’s ferocious nature, is only able to reveal the inner natural bond between it and the child it’s about to devour – instead of open gaping jaws, the painter can only produce a smile on his picture of the animal. Bresnick likewise transforms the ferocious baritone sax into an agent of smooth velvety licks, funny growls, head-bobbing paw taps, and minimalist ostinato purrs. The artist’s tent, expressed in concert by a pyramid of speakers surrounding the listener, cannot be duplicated on CD. The piece’s influences include Terry Riley, jazz, American avant-gardism, and not a little Evan Ziporyn, the virtuoso bass clarinetist who studied with Bresnick in the 70s.

Next is Songs of the Mouse People (1999), a set of five encounters with Kafka’s mouse Josephine, for cello and percussion. We get quiet feminine mouse whining, some soulful cantabile, a bit of scurrying (for percussion solo), and a barriolage-laden Bach-type prelude (I don’t quite get this part). Soloist Maya Beiser and cohort Steven Schick put these across with appropriate charm.

Thirds return in Fantasia on a Theme by Willie Dixon (2001), here as blues intervals inspired by Cream’s (actually Willie Dixon’s) ‘Spoonful’. (Bresnick is an aging boomer gaining sustenance through compositional jamming with his Bang on a Can Yale students, who play the septet affectionately.)

The program closes with the title track, My 20th Century (2002), a sextet for flute, clarinet, string trio, and piano supporting a poem by the late Tom Andrews, whom the composer met during a Rome Academy residency in 1999. The poem, describing some of the poet’s memorable life experiences over the century’s course, is read by various voices over a pulsating diatonic, polymetric minimalism (with effect more akin to Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together or Attica than the Copland, Schoenberg, Beethoven, or Honegger works mentioned in the notes). The piece is a very compelling bit of end-of-century Americana, and, like everything else on this collection, deserves to be heard.

- Gimbel

 

Martin Bresnick, Album: My Twentieth Century
New World Records, 80635 | Buy this CD

A few years back, in the final days of CRI, I wrote the booklet notes for Martin Bresnick's Opere della Musica Povera. The more I listened to his music, the more excited I became about the whole process of music and composing. It actually got me out of a major creative slump. Part of why Bresnick is such a successful teacher is because his own music is simultaneously so open minded and so intoxicating. The pieces on this latest disc equally fascinate, and grow more and more interesting the more you hear them. I admit that the first time I heard Songs of the Mouse People, in a live concert performance, I was somewhat disappointed. But I was blown away when I heard it again on this CD and like it more each time I hear it, especially how the cello and vibraphone seamlessly switch roles in a chain of modulations in the penultimate movement, "A Thousand Shoulders Tremble (under a burden actually meant for one)." This time, I don't have to listen to the disc again and again for any particular reason I just want to. But what's more even exciting is how much inspirational fuel is in here as well. Put it on for an hour, and then go write your own next masterpiece!

- Frank Oteri, NewMusicBox

 

DIVERDI  www.diverdi.com Marzo 2006
B O L E T  Í N D E I N F O R M A C I Ó N  D I S C O G R Á F I C A
146

Martin Bresnick (Nueva York, 1946) aprendió quizá del último Ligeti, de quien fuera alumno, que la verdadera creatividad y originalidad musical no sabe en nuestro tiempo de recetas, plantillas ni moldes mil veces probados, quecada pieza plantea problemas diferentes precisando, por tanto, de soluciones en cada caso también diferentes. Bresnick, radical en su compromiso con la libertad, lleva hasta el extremo tal ideario, y de este modo podemos encontrar en su repertorio un poco de todo, desde influencias minimalistas hasta sonoridades cercanas al rock, desde el fervor por las vanguardias del siglo XX hasta unafijación por el eclecticismo postmoderno, desde composiciones sinfónicas hastatrabajos electrónicos; todo un amante de la variedad y la amalgama, vaya. Pero lo cierto es que este poliestilismo se traduce, al menos en las obras incluidas en esta grabación, en un gran cuidado por la coherencia constructiva y en un sugestivo refinamiento tímbrico. La pieza central de este programa, al que datítulo, es My Twentieth Century, contenida letanía en donde la voz de una narradora rememora de modo fragmentario y poético hechos significativos para el compositor, en especial la muerte de su hermano. Se trata de una música (para violín, viola, violonchelo, piano, flauta y clarinete) de clara adscripción minimalista, no demasiado excitante pero bien concebida. Más interesantes resultan, en mi opinión, Grace, donde dos marimbas elaboran sinuosos motivos que se enhebran con los cadenciales fondos creados por la Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka; Tent of Miracles, para varios saxofones interpretados por el graninstrumentista Taimur Sullivan, que extrae amplias posibilidades sonoras de los mismos; la serie Songs of the Mouse People para violonchelo y percusión, basada en el relato de Kafka Josefina la cantante, de atractiva concepción armónica y elevado refinamiento; y, para terminar, Fantasía sobre un tema de Willie Dixon, músico country-rock que funciona aquí como perfecta excusa para confeccionar una atmósférica composición en donde la guitarra de Mark Stewart juega un papel privilegiado.

- Javier Palacio

English Translation:

Diverdi  www.diverdi.com  March 2006
Bulletin of Recorded Disc Information  146

The fascinating music of a practitioner of  synthesis
Bresnick, the poly-stylist

Martin Bresnick, (NY, 1946) perhaps learned from the great Ligeti, of whom he was a student, that true creativity and originality in the music of our time cannot be found in a recipe, cast from molds, tested a thousand times, and that each piece proposes different precise problems, resulting in different solutions in each case. Bresnick, radical in his commitment to freedom, has brought this ideal to the extreme, and in this way we find a little of everything in his repertory, from minimalist influences to rock styles, from the fervor of the vanguards of the 20th Century, to a fixation with eclectic postmodernism, from symphonic compositions to electronic works, all pursued with a love of variety and synthesis. But it is certain that this poly-stylism reveals, at least in the works included in this recording, great care for coherent construction and a suggestive refinement of timbre.

The central piece in this program, My Twentieth Century, which gives the album its title, contains a litany where the voice of a narrator gives tribute in a poetic and fragmentary way to significant experiences of the composer, especially the death of his brother. This music (for violin, viola, violoncello, piano, flute, and clarinet), is based on a clear minimalist character, not extremely exciting but well made. More interesting things result, in my opinion, in Grace, where marimbas elaborate sinuous motives that thread together the background responses created by the Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka; Tent of Miracles, for various saxophones interpreted by the great performer Taimur Sullivan, that extracts ample sonorous possibilities from the saxophone source; the series Songs of the Mouse People for violoncello and percussion, based on a Kafka story “Josephine the Singer”, of attractive harmonic conception and elevated refinement; and finally, Fantasia on a Theme by Willie Dixon, county-rock music that functions here as a perfect excuse to create the compositional atmosphere in which the guitar of Mark Stewart plays a key role.

-Javier Palacio (Translation by Johanna Bresnick & Dimitri Arias)

 

 

In Martin Bresnick's "Tent of Miracles" (1984), the tape presented three baritone saxophone lines, to which Mr. Sacawa added a fourth live. Some of the work's chunky chordal figures called to mind the late-1990's rock band Morphine, which also relied heavily on baritone saxes. But Mr. Bresnick composed his work long before Morphine came and went, and he moves in other directions as well. Kaleidoscopic bursts, multiphonics, vocalizations and a lengthy section in which the sound of rattling keys creates a hypnotic rhythm keep this changeable work fresh and surprising.

- Allan Kozinn, New York Times

 

"The program closed with a specially commissioned 'encore' by the gifted and inventive American composer Martin Bresnick. This morsel -- appropriately titled 'Encore!' -- is a charmer, sounding rather like some half-remembered warhorse played backward."

— Tim Page, The Washington Post

 

"We felt that there was a certain range that we were looking for. His music is formally clear, and it has a combination of a direct expressivity and a rigorous method, as well as a real sense of sonic immediacy. "

— John Harbison, on the occasion of the Ives Living Award from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York Times.

 

"Martin Bresnick has not become nearly so well known as the quality of his music deserves; no other recent uptown composer possesses a style so elegantly smooth or can say so much with so few notes. Bresnick's works are marked by an economy of materials and lyrical intensity. The secret of Bresnick's language is that he has developed an intervallic way of working with tonality that allows for a smooth continuum between tonality and atonality."

— Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century, Schirmer Books

 

"With the Bresnick Quartet (#3) the ensemble (Harrington String Quartet) seemed to grow by several sizes. This is a complex, challenging work - not because the composer invented difficulties, as composers today seem to like doing, but because its musical ideas need a language of their own.

As a framework to his piece, Bresnick took the opening lines from Canto II of Dante's "Inferno," a scene of deepening gloom as the poet begins his grim journey.

The three movement quartet opens with a series of chords like a November fog-clouds of tones that sort themselves out, a note or two at a time, into a somber, slow-paced chant.

All through the work we hear themes that are not melodies so much as events, combinations of sound that have a character of their own: pizzicatos with the random sound of droplets in a pond (but they seem to be the right notes); harsh chords blurting excitedly over soft long-breathed ones; and, at the close, a high, icy haze of harmonics like distant cirrus clouds.

Bresnick has a way of giving his hearers a guide rope: the rhythmic pattern is clear where the harmonic texture is complex, or the other way around, so we stay more or less on track through all these sonic adventures. An impressive work, superbly played."

— Dan Tucker, Chicago Tribune

Fanfare Magazine
P.O. Box 720, Tenafly, NJ 07670
May/June 2001:

"A Major Event in American Music"

BRESNICK Opere Della Music Povera: Tucket. Follow Your Leader. Pigs & Fishes. New Haven. Woodstock. Angelus Novus. The Bucket Rider. BE JUST! ***. The Dream of the Lost Traveler. Pine Eyes. Bird As Prophet. Jesse Levine, cond; Yale Philharmonia; Povera Players; Marguerite L. Brooks, cond; Yale Pro Musica; Lawrence Leighton Smith, cond; Yale Philharominia; Bang On A Can All-Stars; Da Capo Chamber Players; Lisa Moore (pn); Zeitgeist. CRI 868 (2 CD 1:31:46 TT)

This release is a major event in American music. Martin Bresnick (b.1946) came to national prominence in 1998, when he received the first Charles Ives Living, a stipend from the composerís estate administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which supports a composer for three years, on the condition that s/he quit any "day job". Bresnick sensibly agreed to this proposition, and left (temporarily) his teaching position at the Yale School of Music, where he had been coordinating the composition program for over two decades. The pieces on this recording were written over the decade of the 90's, the last one or two during the period of the grant. What makes this collection remarkable, however, is not just its quality but its cohesion. These pieces are conceived explicitly as a series, even though they work in a wide range of media and forms. The result is a cycle which grows throughout its course in cumulative mastery of technique, expression, and vision.

Bresnick has been one of the most influential teachers of composition in the US, though his profile has previously been that of an eminence grise to some of the more successful younger composers around. He is perhaps best known as the teacher to the troika of directors of the Bang On A Can Festival (Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe), and his concert group at Yale, Sheep's Clothing, and its attendant annual all-night concert, was the inspiration for BOAC. But more substantively, Bresnick is a champion synthesizer of disparate materials. In this sense he mirrors his teacher Ligeti, who also delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconciable. Bresnick brings together in his music repetitive gestures derived from minimalism, a harmonic taste that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies, and a raw power at times reminiscent of rock.

Yet these elements never form a disjointed pastiche---rather, what makes Bresnick's music particularly successful in the way he so thoroughly absorbs them and them produces a seamless product. The title of the cycle comes from the Italian arte povera movement, which made art from the most humble or "poor" materials. In Bresnick's case, the poverty implied is that of simple, mundane materials, authentic in their direct unpretentiousness. That sense of music made from hardscrabble sources (and made on the fly, between endless commitments of his job, as the composer says I his notes) also has a very real political import. And while the nature of Bresnick's politics is crystal-clear, the music never descends into agitprop; one gains the meaning by the way it works on its own terms.

If I can characterize this music with any single word, it would be strong. All the pieces, whether loud or soft, fast or slow, dense or spare, project an intensity of rigorously conceived utterance. This is not aggressive or abusive music. Its rhetoric is confident and powerful, but as a listener one doesn't feel assaulted. Rather, one is exhilarated to hear music that is so concisely wrought, yet also open-spirited. It's like experiencing a bracing natural phenomenon, like a sea-wave crashing over you; you emerge from the onslaught overwhelmed but invigorated.

The series consists of twelve pieces, composed between 1990 and 1999. Each is centered around a particular "home pitch", a type of tonic. And every piece has a "mate", a work conceived to be complementary in harmonic structure and overall character. (A chart by the composer shows a circle of minor seconds, with axial tritone relations between the outer pairs, for those who want to know such things.) The early pieces are very short, usually no more than 3-4 minutes, and one has the sense that they are somewhat like sketches for the longer pieces to come. One hears emerging techniques, such as cycling harmonic progressions in Pigs & Fishes, which will become the full-blown passacaglias of The Dream of the Lost Traveller (1998) and Bird As Prophet (1999). It is at about the halfway point in the cycle that one senses Bresnick really beginning to take off. In the 1995 pair The Bucket Rider and BE JUST!, written for the spectacular Bang On A Can All Stars, the music reaches a level of fullness which has previously been suggested (and somewhat ironically, as The Bucket Rider is an exceptionally quiet and fragile piece, a very poignant portrait of a beaten character from a Kafka story).

From this point on, it almost seems as though Bresnick can do no wrong. The trio *** (1997), the aforementioned The Dream of the Lost Traveller, and Bird As Prophet all have an expansive yet concentrated power of expression. Their harmonic language also becomes far more rich and varied. One can't quite call the music tonal, but the chord progressions that underlie these works are memorable and often ringingly consonant. One composer who comes to mind as a referent for this sound-world is Janacek. But also, the insistence with which ideas are reiterated and developed, and the tautness of the motives which organize the music, all suggest a Beethovenian approach. I don't make this comparison lightly.

Do I have any criticisms? Well, the 1997 Pine Eyes, a theater piece for narrator and trio (with the composer in the speaking part) is a deliberately unsentimental but still deeply affecting retelling of the Pinocchio story. Having said that, the music somehow seems more "incidental" in this piece than in any of the others, i.e. the musical events seem so closely tied to the words as not do develop the sort of autonomous logic I hear in the other works. Thus, it may be more successful in live performance, as a theatrical experience, than it can be on disc. All the performances are first rate, but one seems slightly flawed, i.e. the 1992 Angelus Novus for orchestra. The Yale Philharmonia is the school's graduate orchestra, and it plays with spirit, but in the more exposed chamber sections of the work, the playing seems tentative, and momentum flags. (Happily it returns for a rousing ending; the piece is framed by music of great sweep and vigor, which sounds like a updated trope of the first movement of the Brahms first piano concerto. In a just world, this would be the sort of concert opener that orchestras would play the same way they would play a piece like the Coriolan overture, instead of the neo-pop confections we so often have nowadays.)

In the end, one can hopefully see how much I admire this music. I believe Bresnick stands with John Adams as one of the two leading composers of his generation. His music will inevitably be a bit more "chewy" for listeners than the latter's, and Bresnick does not play with American populist elements to anything near the same degree. But if it is uncompromising, neither is it condescending, and it is certainly never dull. This is a rich feast offered by an artist at the height of his powers, though based on the creative curve of this cycle, I suspect the best from Bresnick is yet to come. A must for my next Want List.


Consumer Guide
by Kyle Gann
Posted May 21st, 2001 7:00 PM

Skimmed Cream

Almost two years have elapsed since my last guide, there's no way to encompass the stacks of new discs rising like diminutive office buildings around my desk. I can offer some of the cream I skimmed, and note that, more and more, the most interesting music is on tiny little labels available from thecomposersbasement.com (a metaphor, not a real Web site). The traditional new-music labels should be ashamed at the amount of great stuff they turn down.

MARTIN BRESNICK
Opere della Musica Povera (CRI)
Bresnick's music is tough, thorny, clear, elegant, thoughtful, and difficult to pin down. So it's an overdue luxury to have such a sumptuous two-disc set devoted to 12 different works of his for different ensembles, though the pieces are unified and linked by cross-referenced pitch relationships. His gestures can be murky at the same time that his pitch logic, often couched Brahmslike in hovering thirds and sixths, can be luminously transparent. Some timbres suit him better than others: The Coplandy piano sonorities of The Dream of the Lost Traveller (played by Lisa Moore) and the massed winds of "Follow Your Leader" are strikingly unusual, the orchestra pieces more modernistically conventional. In short, this is music not to sum up in a few words, but to sink your teeth into and reflect upon at length. A MINUS

 

Poor but provocative
by Joshua Kosman
Sunday, July 1, 2001

MARTIN BRESNICK
Opere della Musica Povera (Works of a Poor Music)
Bang on a Can All-Stars; Da Capo Chamber Players; Lisa Moore, piano; Zeitgeist; Yale Philharmonia; Yale Pro Musica CRI (two CDs), $33.98

For the past decade or so, composer Martin Bresnick has been accumulating chamber and orchestral pieces under the rubric "Opere della Musica Povera" ("Works of a Poor Music"). Now the collection is complete, a fascinating and varied grab bag of a dozen compositions that reflect the emotional and structural concerns of this important artist.

The title refers to Bresnick's determination to work with limited artistic resources -- restricted melodic materials, small performing forces and so on. Yet there's nothing remotely minimalist about the result. Bresnick studied with the Hungarian master Gyorgy Ligeti, but his main influence has always been Schumann, and the lush, dark-hued expressiveness that runs through his music is in evidence here.

It shows up, naturally, in the more overtly Romantic works, such as an alluring trio with the Schumannesque title " " or "The Dream of the Lost Traveller," a gorgeous piano solo inspired by Blake (and given a radiant performance by Lisa Moore). But Bresnick's deeply humanist approach is evident, too, in his more aggressive modernist and postmodernist guises -- particularly "The Bucket Rider" and "BE JUST!," two fiercely enthralling meditations on Kafka's writing.

Not all of the set is equally rewarding. The point of "Angelus Novus," a gloomily portentous orchestral work a la Shostakovich, eluded me, and "Pine Eyes," a word-heavy piece of chamber theater based on "Pinocchio," must work better live than on disc. But the cumulative effect of the set is endlessly provocative.

Robert Curry
The Australian
July 30, 2001

Less aggressively emotive and more profound artistically than the De Profundis was Martin Bresnick's touchingly eloquent For The Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, on texts and engravings by William Blake. Against the despairing motto of the Rzewski/Wilde: "Look where the artistic life leads a man" came the hopeful injunction of the Bresnick/Blake: "Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice / Such are the Gates of Paradise."

Integral to this piece are the projections behind the piano of 17 of Blakes engravings, which have been subtly manipulated and sequenced by video artist Leslie Weinberg.

The recurrent image is that of The Traveller and indeed, Bresnick's piece takes one on a journey of recollection and reflection. The steadily paced video imagery is held in sync and animated by tableaux of disctinctive keyboard passage work which are themselves organised around several clear tonal axes...

Lynette Lancini
RealTime online Magazine
July 28,2001

...Moore returns to introduces us to the complementary work on the program, the Australian premiere of American composer Martin Bresnick's For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (2001). A musical take on the William Blake poem and 21 illuminated line engravings of the same name (1818), Bresnick' composition has its antecedent in the composer's solo piano piece The Dream of the Lost Traveller (1997) which acts as an Epilogue to the larger work, and contains much of the musical DNA for this "piano concerto movie" (composer's appellation). Directed by Robert Bresnick (the composer's brother), video artist Leslie Weinberg's DVD projections consist of simple animations and manipulations of Blake's black & white and illuminated emblems, enlarged onto an on-stage screen above the piano.

Blake's poem and drawings, says the preface to the score, "depict the life of man from birth to death: passage through the four elements, hatching as a child encountering women, reaching for the moon of love, falling into Time's Ocean", and eventually arriving at Death's Door. The concluding verses are addressed to "the Accuser who is the God of this World." And Moore's role was again that of pianist and speaker, this time delivering the entire text of Blake's poem.

As Moore starts to play the pulsing, determined Prologue, we meet the Lost Traveller, our Everyman companion for this 30 minute piece. He zooms on-screen cane in hand, and hurriedly moves through time and space while trees pan right, sky pans left. Musically this world is built from colouristic expressive recitative, intersticed with pulsing sections of relatively static harmonies which rock unevenly, restlessly. Moore again commands a counterpoint of voice and fingers, sometimes speaking the text to a rhythm; sometimes freer; and sometimes sung, as in the Epilogue's slow and gentle jig addressed to Satan.

Weinberg superimposes many of Blake's emblems onto high grain pixilated backgrounds. A child-faced caterpillar rotates, reminding us of a baby free-floating in the womb. A black & white image of worms or unweaving threads swirl like computer-generated 'eye-candy.' The final projection of a starry night sky above the piece's concluding and life-affirming reiterating major 3rds dissolves to rapt applause from the audience, multiple curtain calls for Moore and the welcome appearance of composer Martin Bresnick who was in the audience.

In an era of the supremacy of visual literacy, Bresnick's collaboration with Weinberg in For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise is an example of evolution in action, as is the creation of the Stuart piano. A coherent multi-sensorial work, it invites sustained attention from a far wider audience than 'pure' concert music can hope to do. The proliferation of buzzwords such as cross art form and multi-media has been used to describe many mediocre efforts. This is not one of them. And regarding the Stuart, in this concert the wealth of artistic stimulus given life by Moore's outstanding performances was so compelling, that awareness of the tool slipped from consciousness as the creations were built.

 
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