Mildred's Thoughts
Music by Peter Hatch (Texts by Gertrude Stein)
Performed by NUMUS. Catalog: ART-011
The story so far...
by Christopher Fox
For the last fifteen years Canadian Composer Peter Hatch has been steadily generating a remarkable body of work, remarkable not only because its good to listen to but also because it's capable of stimulating our intelligence as well as our ears. This is the first disc to be devoted exclusively to this music.
Two things become clear about Peter Hatch from this disc: one is his delight in the very stuff of music, the pleasure he finds, and wants us to share, in listening to sounds rubbing together, or stretching out, or bouncing off one another; the other is his fascination with the words and ideas of Gertrude Stein. Of the five works recorded here, three are specifically connected with Stein: in A Chopsticks Fantasy and Reflections on the Atomic Bomb, texts by Stein are spoken during the music (something Hatch does elsewhere in his When Do They is not the same as Why Do They [1988], one of the most striking recent additions to the solo percussionist's repertoire); in And As He Stein's words are sung. And As He is the middle movement from Hatch's largest work to date, Mounting Picasso (1993), which projects Stein's "If I told him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso" into an evening-long piece of music-theatre.
It's hard to think of a composer (certainly not since John Cage in the 1940s) on whom the writing of Gertrude Stein has had such a profound influence. But Hatch's work was Stein-ish even before it began to make specific reference to her; indeed if Gertrude Stein hadn't existed Peter Hatch would probably have had to invent her eventually.
Blunt Music is an example of Hatch's pre-Stein Stein-ish-ness. In the north of England (my home), the expression 'to put it bluntly' is not so much an apology for a lack of verbal precision as a promise that what is to be said will be said clearly, without affectation. This it seems to me is part of what all Peter Hatch's work (and not just Blunt Music) is about. Hatch is not afraid to appropriate musical figures and forms with which we are already familiar, like the simple tonal harmonies which form the materials of Blunt Music or the folk-clarinet figures ofEurhythmy. What Hatch recognises is that the very familiarity of these sounds breeds the ambiguities on which his music thrives. Again there's a debt to Stein; as in her work the words may be simple, but combined they form complex ideas. Or as she said herself, 'sentences are not emotional and paragraphs are;' in Stein and Hatch's art expression lies not in the formation of bon mot but in the twisting and turning of gathered evidence.
What are the notes F and G when they're sounded together on a piano? Sometimes they're the sound of a piano, sometimes they're a major second, sometimes they're the first two notes of the third inversion of a dominant seventh chord in root position, and sometimes they're the beginning of Chopsticks. In A Chopsticks Fantasy Peter Hatch makes his music in this space between the signifier and the signified and the result is both exciting and witty. (I particularly like the moment where the piano idiom veers sharply towards avant-gardiste chaos, the sort of piano writing of which conservative listeners say, 'A three year old could do better' -- But three year olds like to play Chopsticks too!)
The moment when things turn out not to have been what we thought they were is a moment that Peter Hatch is fond of visiting. On this disc there are at least three examples, none more spine-tingling than that at the end of Reflections on the Atomic Bomb when Stein's chillingly acute observations, not so much about the atomic bomb as about humanity's capacity for disinterest (if it's not The Bomb then it's Bosnia, if it's not Bosnia then it's a bomb in a building full of children) are spoken over music whose components we thought we knew. Until this coda begins , we believe that we are listening to a beautifully crafted piece of ensemble music. There is much to enjoy: the unfolding of long-legged melodic lines, subtly graded harmonies and a sophisticated two movement form which nests disruptive elements of each movement in the heart of the other movement. None of this prepares us for the sting in the tail, but that story is best told by the music itself...
Christopher Fox is a composer/writer who lives in York, England.
�1995 Christopher Fox
About Me —
Reaching for Nothing: Water's Thirst
2007 • 1 hour 50 minutes • Mezzo-soprano, viola, 2 celli, percussion. (Interdisciplinary work created in collaboration with visual artist Dereck Revington, with David Earle, choreographer.)
Reaching for Nothing: Water's Thirst is a 110 minute audio-visual meditation in which the breath of space, light and sound move as currents in a stream, crossing and weaving a four dimensional tapestry in which the audience is immersed.
In her essay "The Anthropology of Water", the poet Anne Carson writes: "Since ancient times, pilgrimages have been conducted from place to place, in the belief that a question can travel into an answer as water into thirst" Theoretical physicists from around the globe travel to the Perimeter Institute on such a quest. Within the institute there is a theatre: a stage for sounding the currents of subatomic speculation and research. It is also a place of crossing, where local and international artists are invited to stage similarly ineffable questions through a visceral mathematics of sound and light presented to a larger community.
The work of a composer is normally measured in time; the work of an architect conventionally measured in space. As collaborators, we began by considering the temporal aspects of space and the spatial aspects of sound. Soon, underlying shape-shifting and time-shifting themes began moving through the piece. Reaching for Nothing: Water's Thirst is not an opera, a dance or a film; there is no narrative or program to follow. It is what might happen when one risks dissolving categories, as currents in a stream interflow, wind and unwind in a perpetual dance of becoming.
Much of the movement through time and through space in this piece is inspired by, and derived from, the movement of river water seen in the long opening overture. As with the river so the auditory and the visual interweave, follow or lead, mirror or echo one another in continuous metamorphoses, births and deaths. Time unfolds slowly in this piece, based on a pulse of a "beat" every three seconds and created in such a way as to allow for a "breathing" between elements of the work.
In Reaching for Nothing: Water's Thirst we try to make sense of our existence through the visual and the aural and from a range of perspectives, including those of the philosopher, the poet, the priest, the shaman and the scientist.
The work is in nine sections, each anchored by a specific allegorical or poetic text. These are ancient recurring themes found in many myths, poems and sacred texts from both eastern and western traditions and through which the redemptive powers of art and imagination continuously flow.
In some scenes libretti, drawn from their underlying texts, are spoken, sung, whispered or chanted (in Sanskrit, English, Spanish or Italian). In others the underlying texts serve purely as catalysts from which the composer, the visual artist and the choreographer, draw their material and inspiration. In this way shared focus and attention is attained while being held within an overall visual and temporal structure as a pattern of mirrors and inversions moves backwards and forwards through the piece.
Performed: May 1-2, 2008
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo
Peter Hatch: Co-Creator/Director/Composer
Dereck Revington: Co-Creator/ Director/Designer (stage, lighting, videos, masks)
David Earle: Choreography
Laird Macdonald: Lighting Design/ Associate Set Design /Technical Direction
John D. S. Adams: Sound Design/Audio Engineer
Anne-Marie Donovan: Associate Director
Anne-Marie Donovan, Mezzo Soprano
David Rose: Viola
Paul Pulford, Lorna Heidt: Cello
John Brownell: Percussion
Suzette Sherman, Michael English: Dancers