Carla Bley

9. End of Vienna: Fancy Chamber Music

75 9 End of Vienna Fancy Chamber Music in 1974, when bley wrote 3/4, the piano concerto commissioned by the New York group the Ensemble, she delved into composing for classically trained musicians for the first time. The title of the piece refers to the triple meter typical of a waltz. Scored for chamber orchestra (including two percussionists , melodic and nonmelodic, and an orchestral pianist in addition to the piano soloist), 3/4 starts out as a slow minor waltz, with short two-bar cells that are repeated several times. Combining her affection for the waltz with her fondness of the mechanical, Bley has the drums create sound effects she describes in the score as “windings, creakings,”“rattlings, tickings,” and “whirrings, grindings.” The perpetual-motion plodding of the second piano is strict and repetitive, providing unity to the piece. The other instruments are treated as fleeting soloists, changing the orchestral color as they move in and out of the foreground. The solo piano part is dictated to an extent by key, scale, or chord changes; sometimes the pianist is instructed to provide “light fill” in a particular key; sometimes the music is written out and doubled by the second pianist. Following a conventionally placed cadenza, the final section has the soloist improvising over chord changes before the ensemble winds down, echoing the opening with its windings , rattlings, and tickings. The 3/4 meter is maintained religiously throughout, and the piece is adventurous harmonically but not rhythmically (one reviewer 76 compared its relentless rhythmic drive to that of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero).1 Aside from the solo piano part, played at the premiere by Keith Jarrett, all the other parts are intended to be read directly from written-out parts. Perhaps this relatively conservative approach to the scoring of 3/4 reflected Bley’s hesitancy to ask classical musicians to improvise and her lack of confidence then in the ability of conservatory-trained players to handle complex material. Up to that point in her career, her primary musical collaborators had been musicians trained in the collaborative and improvisatory styles of jazz or rock. Though many of Bley’s non-big-band compositions are chamber music of some kind, since the mid-1980s she has occasionally worked in a category she calls “Fancy Chamber Music.” Compositions in this category—currently about ninety minutes of music scored for flute, clarinet, violin,viola, cello, bass, piano, vibes, and percussion—consist of fully notated pieces for nonimprovising musicians. In 1996 Bley released the record Fancy Chamber Music, which includes six works played by an octet. The booklet accompanying the CD of this recording relentlessly spoofs the conventional pretensions of classical music culture—the sort of thing one finds, for example, in program booklets at the Lincoln Center—by including high-end advertisers or corporate sponsors with addresses on FifthAvenue,phony companies (e.g.,“Tournoff”watches and“Hole”investment advice),and a list of administrators (Ilene Mark,who managesWattWorks,is listed as“Chairman of the Development Committee”; Timothy Marquand and Wolfgang Puschnig are listed as “Chamber Music Program Co-Chairs”).Though the“Chamber MusicAnnual Fund”includes a disclaimer that “costs require that [it] limit [the] listing of donations to those of $1 and above,” it goes on to list just two categories of contributors: the Golden Circle (donations of $500,000 or more) and the Silver Circle ($500,000 or less). Listed as Golden Circle donors are, among others, the Alrac Music Endowment Trust (a reference to Bley’s self-publishing organ), the Watt Family Foundation Charitable Trust, and Editions for Contemporary Music (i.e., ECM). Despite the silliness of the recording’s presentation—a piano-playing Bley in a formal black dress and elbow-length fingerless gloves graces the cover—and its overt mockery of classical music’s elitism and self-conscious rituals, Bley’s pieces of “Fancy Chamber Music” are serious compositions in their own right. This body of work included a piece called Coppertone (though that work does not appear on the Fancy Chamber Music record), commissioned by the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society in 1986,and several quintet arrangements of compositions from a set of eight solo piano pieces dedicated to Ursula Oppens, Alan Feinberg, and Robert Shannon (1987; reorchestrated 1997). Oppens premiered the set in 1988. Named Romantic Notions, these pieces strip the music down to its c a r l a b l e y | End of Vienna [18.117.162.80] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 13:19...