The Last Movement
Aftermath
My preference for no rules in music includes one big rule. Avoid the use of the word new to describe new music. On a technicality, I understand the impulse. A piece of music finished just a few moments ago is “new” but the music part of the new music is quite literally old. A crass rearrangement of outmoded things. My romantic sensibilities associate new with hope. I imagine a music that encompasses all the wisdom of the past and sings a new song.
I’m occupied by these tangled thoughts as I attempt to review the premiere performance of Fable for Orchestra. This two-movement work is a rearrangement of ideas last made popular in the early 20th century. At present, I feel trapped, subjected to the mediocrity and mundanity of a heavy-handed composer.
The opening movement, titled The Last Movement, is a duet for clarinet and tympani. What a strange experience to look upon a massive orchestra (535 players to be exact, I counted) and hear only the outbursts of two instruments. The structure of the first movement is sinister in its simplicity. Occasionally, randomly, the tympani interject a kind of sound-bomb. The undamped reverberation is allowed to linger beyond reason. Then, from under the fading echo, the clarinet emerges with a series of staccato notes. To understand the clarinet effect here, imagine an amateur player attempting to play a pitch over the break with a broken reed. The people flinch when it sounds. So far, this appears to be the totality of the music as it repeats BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOMMMMmmmmm BOOM…..BOOMMMMMMMM……, then squack squack squack squack squack squack squack.
We are tempted to think the composer is exerting a mighty power here, composing as a dare, doing things for no other reason than he can. That analysis takes his music as a perverse joke, in which case the audience is to wink back, because decency is hilarious. Alternatively, one could recognize that the barbaric music is a device used to disguise contempt for the audience. What are the assertions of this tuneless tympani? What deception does the clarinet flaunt? What darkness derives from the silence of the rest of the orchestra?
False interpretations abound. Take for example the strains of the clarinet. One ear claims to hear a beautiful hymn, and the other ear explains that no, this is an intolerable discord. The clarinet reveals a philosophy when asked to defend its atonality; the hymn is not to be heard by everyone. The audience is scandalized. We look to one another through tears in our lashes with the unspoken question, what kind of hymn is not for everyone?
I look at my watch. 7:12 PM. I don’t understand. This concert began at 8:00. We have been sitting through The Last Movement for what feels like hours, yet we have gone back in time. I noticed the date-display on my watch. January 1933. But how! This concert began in February 2020. The first movement ended decades before it started. Like it or not, we know how it turns out.
The second movement, Aftermath, will begin shortly. The inevitability finds a pit in the bottom of our stomachs. Even the silence is controlled by the composer. The musicians have no music. We hope they get it right. Actually, the audience knows the tune from memory. Understanding this, the composer rewrites memory. He borrows chords from suffering and calls them the end of decline.
Around me sits a blithely satisfied audience. They are protagonists in the composer's fictional ballad. In the program notes are these lines from Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann: The masses in the future will be provided with mythical fictions, devised like primitive battle cries. Popular myths would become the vehicle of political action; fables; insane visions; chimaeras, which need nothing to do with truth or reason or science in order to be creative, determine the course of life and history, and thus prove themselves as dynamic realities.
The orchestra is just sitting there. They wait for Aftermath to begin. Perhaps then they can restore what has been defaced here. I look around at waiting people, and I notice something so frightening that it makes me hopeful. There is no justice in this concert hall. I remembered then that during the opening movement, we helplessly watched as justice departed. Stubborn faith remains because justice has run away from this place. It is elsewhere. Justice goes where it is not performable. It finds a place where discerning citizens breathe the air of truth, where it can live as a real, stunningly gorgeous melody. This song is as inevitable as the aftermath. It will never be composed by the likes of these men. The audience is the performance now. What will they do?