Vignettes of Old Masters VIII: Two Pieces by Robert Morris (A Review and a Liner Note)

VIGNETTES OF OLD MASTERS VIII: TWO PIECES BY ROBERT MORRIS (A REVIEW AND A LINER NOTE) BENJAMIN BORETZ BOB MORRIS / GARY SNYDER “THIS BUBBLE OF A HEART” / KAREN CLARK GALAX QUARTET / INNOVA #795: SONGS ON POEMS BY GARY SNYDER BY FRED FRITH, W. A. MATHIEU, ROBERT MORRIS, ROY WHELDON GO INTO EXPERIENTIAL OVERDRIVE listening to Bob’s Gary Snyder song for its unflinching on-sleeve expressivity, for how it puts my working Bob-paradigms into baseline meltdown, coming on with molten four-voiced sirensinging string quartet sound, flowing on to amiably reinvent harmony, time, instrumental–vocal quality, ensemble texture, text utterance. In meaning and surface both. Poem-expression alchemizing into pitch-structured spectral magic, as rigorously formed as any Bobwork I know. Expression sweet and passionate without nostalgia, no retro-style exercises slyly loaded with kneejerk emoresponse cues. Just Bob’s own cutting-edge utterly post-postmodern language (free as a bird to do its own thing). And Karen’s voice speaking, crooning, ululating, tracing always unecstatic expressive parabolas seamlessly, unstrained, innocent wholly of cheap theater. You I 108 Perspectives of New Music don’t mistake her voice for Gary Snyder’s voice; but his voice is all there, unmistakably composed-in within and above Bob’s, Karen’s, and the Galaxes’, reflected, reconceived, recontemplated, understood. ROBERT MORRIS: QUATTRO PER QUATTRO MOMENTA STRING QUARTET OPEN SPACE CD 32 You don’t have to “understand” Bob Morris’s music to be aware of how good it sounds. In fact you might be drawn into its sound world first before you articulate the surges and ebbs of its other energies. There’s nothing neutrally “structural” about its passages: its gestures are organic energies; its patterns speak as telling utterances, speaking explicit sense. Speaking sense, however, purely as musicmusic (as Jim Randall and I used to call certain phenomena within our Inter/Play improvisation sessions): so don’t reach outside of music to grasp the expressive coloration of these configurations. And perhaps—to optimize your experience of Bob’s soundsongs—don’t even grope for fancy descriptive language to apply to them, in the hope of a fast track to full immersion. Not just in the case of Bob’s music, but especially in the case of his music, that may lead you counterproductively away from the unmediated sonic clarity of the indigenous but airtight sonic vessels it creates. If you can imagine pursuing your successive listenings to progressively release your extramusical or metamusical baggage, you might possibly reach a place of unobstructed sonic awareness; this is the place where Bob’s music has its maximum intricate micromeaningful being. So the pervasive canons in Quattro per Quattro aren’t most vividly experienced as cognitions that they are canons; that raw fact underlies but doesn’t constitute or illuminate their musical effects. Listen hard and unencumbered and you can hear something tightly and densely involuting, a gravitational field about to go by in a blur but instead playfully, tenderly unraveling to materialize as a skein of singly singing, singly gyrating parts, embodied voices even, enacting gracefully the strands of separate sense and gesture that turn out to have been embedded as voices of the molten monolith from which they emerge. And it’s always the sound, always the residue of how it “sounds”—not really “good” as I started out saying, but so very precisely particular, so —massively or exquisitely—superspecific, more poignantly specific than your intuition of specificity is quite ready for. [Of course, given that the intricately explicit, complexly evolving denotative pitch geographies informing every molecule of Quattro per Vignettes of Old Masters VIII: Two Pieces by Robert Morris 109 Quattro, can easily preoccupy your knowing ear, you might be drawn to hearing, indexing, appreciating those concrete quantified properties —and perhaps never know the musicmagic qualities that are the experiential payoff of their presence. But music, as Bob knows well, is poetry. Its meanings are the resonances that are the residue of composing, ordering, conjoining, transforming, ramifying quantities and qualia, the unique specificities that ontologize time uniquely as experience. They (the meanings) are experiential effects, not equivalent to the facts that may be claimed to cause them; their cognition is individual, subjective...