Martin Bresnick’s Presentation

On the last day of the festival, Martin Bresnick presented on his own music, in the manner of the other principal composers. Some composers are quite shy to talk about their work, for obvious reasons: they don’t want to reveal their “tricks”, or they don’t want to share a private or personal inspiration behind a piece, and so on. Bresnick, however, dove right into the substance of his work: why he composes, how he composes, and what his pieces are all about.

Bresnick started off quite seriously by admonishing the composers and performers that music is dangerous and powerful, and that one must always treat it as a life and death matter. One must always do music at the highest level; in a sense, he said, being a musician is similar to being called to priesthood.

This philosophy guides Bresnick’s own work. He brings everything he can to his music, to the point that he considers his own artistic aims to be  ”excessively ambitious.” In his works, he strives to be personally expressive and philosophical, and to create architectonic forms.

That last aim – creating architectonic forms - was one of the recurring themes throughout Bresnick’s presentation. Bresnick said outright at the beginning of his talk that he felt that many of the student composers at Music10 neglected formal integrity in favour of the surface elements of a composition. His point of view provided a nice counterpoint to those of Hartke and Hoffman, who discussed primarily surface elements, such as orchestration, and the important role that intuition plays when they compose. Intuition plays a less significant role in Bresnick’s compositional process, as he does not rely on it when he works out the formal elements of a composition.

This is not to say that the surface of a composition is unimportant to Bresnick – as he put it, “Nobody fell in love with their partner because they have beautiful ribs in their chest!” However, Bresnick urged the composers at Music10 to try to strike a balance in their works between creating a beautiful surface, and ensuring that there is a lasting structure holding that surface up.

After this weighty introduction, Bresnick expounded on his aesthetic philosophy by means of analysing several pieces. He began with Brahms’s Intermezzo in B minor, op. 119, no. 1, which has long served as a model for him, and then discussed three of his own works: Bird as Prophet, *** (the so-called “Three-Star” trio for viola, clarinet, and piano), and My Twentieth Century. (The last two were performed at Music10.)

I was especially happy that he talked about My Twentieth Century, as the piece had had quite a profound effect on me  at eighth blackbird’s concert on Monday night. He discussed both the extramusical significance of the work – its meaning – and its musical structure.  This work is Bresnick’s artistic response to the twentieth century as a whole – it is, in essence, a protest piece. In between playing their instruments, the musicians take turns reciting the lines of a poem written by a friend of Bresnick’s, the poet Tom Andrews. The poem starts out sounding like a bittersweet reminiscence of the twentieth century, but gradually turns darker, as the line “My brother died in the twentieth century” comes back again and again. The twentieth century, in Bresnick’s opinion, was a disaster – everyone’s brother died in some useless, human-caused way.

In discussing his decision to have the instrumentalists read lines of the poem, Bresnick referred to Charles Ives, whom he called a ”democratic” composer. By this, he meant that Ives allowed for, and encouraged, imperfections in his music, such as wrong notes and off rhythms. In the same way, Bresnick wanted to demonstrate that music was permeable to imperfections by encouraging the players to speak in their own voices, regardless of what kind of accent they have, or how poorly they speak English. Personally, I find works like My Twentieth Century fascinating  because they allow an element of theatricality to emerge that is usually prevalent only in vocal music, rather than purely instrumental music. I would have never thought of it in the way that Bresnick described it – as “democratic” – if I were left to my own devices. Again, one of the perks of getting to hear the composer himself speak!

On a purely musical level, Bresnick discussed the ways in which he organised both the rhythm of and the pitches of My Twentieth Century. As I said in my review of the piece, there is a driving ostinato that runs throughout the work. Apparently, the rhythmic patterns he used are loosely based on those found in Balkan dances. His goal in using these types of rhythms throughout the piece was to give it a dancelike, obsessive quality, thus tying his work to the age-old, mythical totentanz (“dance of death”). Although he employs asymmetrical meters such as 5/16 or 7/16 throughout the work, he structured the piece quite rigorously into sections that are each 60 sixteenth notes long. During the sections when the instrumentalists recite the lines of the poem, however, the meter evens out into 12/16; so the spoken sections each consist of 5 measures of 12/16. Thus, he uses regular and irregular meter to distinguish between the purely instrumental sections of the piece, and those in which the instrumentalists speak.

Bresnick’s approach to pitches in My Twentieth Century was similarly systematic. Each of the instrumentalists only plays in sections, as they take turns reciting lines of the poem as well. So, any time that a particular instrument plays for a section, it only plays four pitches; moreover, all of these four-note groups are symmetrical.

The most fascinating bit of symmetry that Bresnick discussed had to do with the pitch centre of the piece. Earlier in the presentation, Bresnick had been talking about the importance of the interval of the tritone in his works; it turns out that My Twentieth Century is no exception. The whole work is centred around the pitch C sharp, although all twelve notes are used at some point in the piece. The one pitch that is reserved till the end of the piece is G, which lies a tritone away from C sharp. Bresnick introduces the pitch G at a crucial moment of the work, at the recitation of the lines: ”There was something very obvious in the twentieth century / I could never see or understand.”

 After hearing Bresnick speak, I understand why he takes Brahms as one of his models. Just as Brahms did over a century ago, Bresnick strives in his compositions to unite a rigorous structure with deep, vitally important meaning, the emotional climaxes of his work coinciding with the formal ones. What type of music could be more satisfying, and more necessary, to discuss and to perform than this?

Leave a Reply