The 2003 Masterprize Gala: A Second Look

By Wm. B. Fankboner

A persistent complaint of classical music lovers the world over is that no one is composing music in the grand style any more. Contemporary classical music is becoming more and more like the plastic arts, where a painting or a sculpture is no longer judged in terms of its formal beauty and emotional content, but by the amount of esoteric discussion it generates among a coven of talking heads and academic theorists. It was as a counterpoise to this lunacy that the Masterprize Gala was conceived. The finalists of this musical competition are selected by a write-in vote of the general audience rather than by a clique of establishment critics. But for one reason or another the results of these competitions have been less than spellbinding. It would appear that the general audience is no better at judging new music than the talking heads of academe. Whereas the professors and critics are ensnared in esoteric theory, the groundlings seem attracted to the novelty of catchy titles, programmatic content, odd-ball instrumentation, and whimsical excursions into pop idiom.

Where have all the classical composers gone? There can be no doubt that popular genres have lured many away from the finicky classicism taught in most music schools. Works like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band may lack classical gravitas, but they are at least as musically interesting as Schubert's timeless song cycles, Die Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin. Likewise recent film scores compare favorably with 'serious' compositions from the romantic era, and Thomas Newman, Carter Burwell, John Williams and Philip Glass certainly have nothing to be ashamed of. Listeners lamenting the aridity of modern classical idioms will find reason to celebrate the rise of popular troubadours like Bob Dylan, Jackson Brown, and Gordon Lightfood. Granting all this, though, one would have thought that out of over one thousand Masterprize entries at least one would rise to the level of musical art. Well, actually, one did: Robert Henderson's Einstein's Violin, an orchestral scherzo, overlooked in the fusillade of criticism following this year's Gala performance of the London Symphony Orchestra (conductor: Daniel Harding).

Though only a little over ten minutes in length, Einstein's Violin is a work of compelling power and subtlety. The quaint notion that an audience must sit through an hour-long work to get it's music fix is a distinctly nineteenth century bias: it is no coincidence that Prokofiev's finest symphony is also his shortest. A piece of music can say all it needs to say in a few minutes. If the quality of Einstein's Violin is any indication, the dearth of new music may be due to the timidity of orchestra conductors and the recording industry, who continue to load up on the safe old chestnuts at the expense of unknown works. This is a disservice to both revered classics and new music: it reduces the traditional works to over-familiar schlock, and it deprives contemporary composers of a venue in which to showcase their works. An example of this vulgarization of the classical repertoire is Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings re-scored for female chorus. Enough said.

Robert Henderson is what's called a formalist, or a composer steeped in the Aristotelian unities; so his compositions tend to be compact and workmanlike; but to judge by a handful of pieces (see below) he has not been a prolific one; nor at the age of fifty-five can he any longer be described as a wunderkind. He is at that stage in an artist's life when a reprieve from obscurity is greeted with a rueful smile and a philosophic shrug. That said, some of the greatest works in the classical repertoire were produced in twilight years of a composer's career (Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder springs to mind); and a composer need only produce one masterwork (like Telemann's Suite in A-Minor or Rodrigo's Concierto De Arnajuez) to achieve musical immortality. Time will tell if Henderson is capable of this rare feat, but Einstein's Violin has surely earned him a place on the contemporary playbill.

'Scherzo' is an Italian word meaning joke, but this work is anything but light-hearted. A sense of foreboding, gloom, and existential dread, pervades the piece (somewhat reminiscent of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht) with two lyric interludes to relieve the Sturm unt Drang. The work stirs to life with ominous violence, like some mythic beast roused from a nightmare. Informed by a mysterious premonition, the music hurtles headlong to a cosmic doomsday with the impersonal fury of a runaway train. The astonishing thing about this work is its uncompromising energy, its relentless kinetic power. In short, this is one scary piece of music: Einstein's Violin conveys not only a sense of impending doom, but the reminder that we inhabit a violent universe. Even its most tranquil passages seem driven by a Faustian pact with the 'strong force' of the universe. Think of Bartok on steroids.

A work bursting with so much turbulent energy is an invitation to self-indulgence, and one might have expected the composer to take some liberties with form, but happily this is not the case. The musical intensity is controlled by a commensurate passion for form and craftsmanship. Unlike some of the other works in the Masterprize competition, which wandered from one musical idea to the next with little awareness of the architectural whole, Einstein's Violin is all of a piece, designed to achieve maximum dramatic impact in space-time. Rather than a slack sequence of disconnected melodies, the melodic energy is suspended in a taut matrix of complementary tensions.

This control is evident in the opening melodic statement, a polyphonic flourish of staggered interlocking counterpoints articulated in the basses and answered by high winds. Bits and pieces of the theme are broken off like DNA nucleotides and replicated in other parts of the work. What seem to be new melodies turn out to be ingenious transformtions of this opening theme. Rather than rely on arbitrary classical forms, the composer probes melodic intervals for latent meaning. It seems a painstaking technique, but the result is a high degree of formal and emotional coherence and transparency, i.e. a gem-like core of material bonded together with the force of a few simple melodic ideas.

Henderson's orchestration is as dazzling and subtle as a Persian tapestry. In fact, Guardian music critic Andrew Clements complained that the work could have been composed by Rimsky-Korsakov. Is this criticism or praise? Did anyone ask if Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture could have been written by Tchaikovsky? The chances are that both of these Russian Romantics would have been baffled by Henderson's use of clashing time signatures, harmonic density, dissonance and melodic fragmentation––the musical idiom of twentieth century angst. Another critic, Robert Maycock, said the piece 'lacked freshness.' All of which serves to confirm that while audiences may hanker after mere quality, the critics are still stuck in some Hegelian limbo where the arts advance by a dialectical procession.

If we are to conclude anything from the plaintive interludes that divide the work, it is that Henderson is not obdurately opposed to the use of a simple melodic line; nevertheless, he seems less interested in constructing rich mountings for sensuous and evocative melodies, than in a complex organic fusion that transforms the sequential (or temporal) domain into the instantaneous present. The high intensity or energy level of this work serves not only a dramatic effect, it is a way of keeping as many musical ideas in play at one time as possible. Be forewarned: after hearing Einstein's Violin, it may be some time before you are in the mood for a Strauss waltz.

We understand that Henderson, who grew up in Southern California and studied composition at USC, is also an accomplished conductor and horn player. Both are very laudable pursuits in their way, but we think it's time to put these toys aside. Posterity is not kind to composers who squander their genius in frivolous pursuits. Just ask Leonard Bernstein.

Wm. B. Fankboner © 2004
Indio, California

wfankboner@dc.rr.com
williefank@aol.com