Network For New Music: Composing for painting

The latest Network for New Music concert continued a season-long series that highlights interactions between music and the visual arts. This one presented three pieces created for commissions that required the composers to base their work on paintings.

An ethically challenged composer could handle such a commission by creating a piece he would have written anyway, accompanied by a statement that tied the music to the painting after the fact. I know writers who do things like that when they're asked to contribute stories to an anthology built around a particular theme. Pull a story out of your files, make a minor adjustment here or there, and presto! You've fulfilled the requirements. Messrs. Harbison, Laganella, and Brodhead seem to have rejected that temptation and taken the idea seriously.

In his notes for Six American Painters, John Harbison admits, "Like many musicians, I've always felt that looking at paintings is the least alert of the things I do." In his work on the piece, Harbison says, "I hoped to develop my visual sense; I did a lot of research and I spent many hours looking at paintings."

All the paintings associated with Harbison's work are housed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, so the Network audience couldn't look at them before the concert. But Harbison broadened his scope by naming the six sections after painters, rather than paintings. I had no trouble seeing the connection in the sections devoted to painters with whom I'm familiar.

In the section on Winslow Homer, for example, you can feel the restlessness of the wind and the sea. The interlude with Thomas Eakins begins with a dramatic opening, followed by an intense passage for the flute, and sonorous string passages— a good reflection of Eakins's dramatic subjects, stubborn individuality, and detailed, significant backgrounds.

A California earthquake

David Laganella's Unattainable Space is based on an over-sized painting that seems to have been inspired by California's visions of the ultimate earthquake. Ben Peterson's California Ten hasn't been framed yet, so the audience had to peruse a small reproduction in the program. But you can't look at it without thinking of an earthquake.

Laganella says he was mostly interested in the way the painting uses space when he composed his piece for clarinet, string trio and percussion. But his music also suggests alarms, crises and even moans and cries for help.

Harbison's piece could have used more of the variations in tempo and mood that the standard musical forms force on composers. The third composer, Richard Brodhead, avoided that problem by creating four movements that employ classic forms. His movements bear titles like "Variations" and "Scherzo" in addition to the names of four Pennsylvania Academy paintings. Brodhead said he tried to create music that could stand on its own but would also enhance the paintings.

The qualities of Rittenhouse Square

Brodhead's second movement set of variations reminded me of a comment on parks that Jane Jacobs made in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Attractive parks are usually laid out so the people inside them can't grasp the structure at a glance.

Rittenhouse Square was one of her examples. The square's geometric structure jumps out at you when look at aerial views. But it isn't obvious when you're standing inside it.

For his variations, Brodhead devised a structure that's too complex to be grasped by the ear, even though it might be obvious if you read the score. In a normal set of variations, one variation follows the other in a simple linear progression. Brodhead wrote two sets of variations played by different combinations of instruments and interleaved them. The result is a constantly varying landscape held together by a structure that's sensed rather than seen.

Following a commuter train, musically

His Scherzo, on the other hand, has a structure a child could follow. The movement is based on Morris Hall Pancoast's The Pennsy Train Shed, and it follows the progress of a train as it passes through bustling urban neighborhoods and quieter suburban locales, in the same way the Chestnut Hill locals connect areas like Center City and Germantown Avenue with neighborhoods marked by greenery and upscale emulations of English villages.

The Scherzo slips seamlessly into the final movement, a passacaglia inspired by Whistler's The Thames. It's the most impressionistic of the four movements— an evocation of the grandeur of the city and its river— and it brought the piece to a solid, satisfying end.

I liked the Brodhead best, but all three pieces were well worth hearing. If you've avoided the new music scene because you associate it with disconnected beeps and twangs, you should gird yourself and give the Network a try. The days when composers deliberately tried to infuriate the audience have become a dim memory.