Through Alan’s Eyes
Chapter 5
At this juncture in my life as a composer, it began to dawn on me that while I was gaining consistently more control of the music created by the use of large blocks of sound, my basic practice in simpler, linear counterpoint was fast falling by the wayside. With the end of recovering ready command of this part of my technique, which I had not used to any great degree since Juilliard days, I sought out help from conductor-composer Giampaolo Bracali, with whom I began to meet fairly regularly in the autumn of 1988. I came to value his advice even after the regularity of our sessions dropped off to an occasional hour a few times a year. Though never letting him steer me away from the basic conception of any composition I had begun, I trusted Bracali’s judgment in a way that I had not since my relationship with Vincent Persichetti, and his death in 2006 was a source of great sadness to me.
In 1988-89, I composed a Quartet for Piano and Strings, beginning a period of intense work on chamber music as well as an eccentric pattern I would repeat a few years later in my Violin Sonata. After its premiere performance, I came to a decision to discard the two outer movements as somewhat lacking in maturity and stylistically too different from one another to form a cohesive whole. I ended up retaining the middle (and best) movement as a separate piece entitled Quasi Una Fantasia for violin, viola, cello and piano, which has enjoyed some minor success. It is a relatively short work which, despite its title, is in modified A-B-A form. Both the opening and closing of the piece consists largely of a sequence of major and minor seconds in the piano, with intricate variations in rhythm supported by subtle but constant use of all three piano pedals, while muted strings alternate a series of major and minor sixths and sevenths, played tremolando with sudden dynamic leaps. An interlude, marked Alla’ Marcia, is hardly a march in the traditional sense. The meter changes in almost every bar (as happens more often than not in most of my later work), and the music builds from a pianissimo to a triple forte, culminating in an explosion in the strings with only a middle “D” in the piano left hanging in midair until the other instruments, once again muted and misterioso, rejoin to lead us back to a variant of the opening, on which the work gradually dies away into the nothingness from whence it came.
My next chamber work, Five Pieces for Woodwind Quintet, also composed in 1989, is an anomaly in my output for two reasons: 1) up to that point, I never had any great interest in wind groups (this has changed— you only need listen to much of the orchestration of “The Mystic Trumpeter” to grasp that fact) and 2) what I came up with for some odd reason sounded a bit too reminiscent of Stravinsky’s middle-period Neo-Classicism, which I listened to rarely and without great enthusiasm (mostly because it left me emotionally cold – this, for better or worse, has not changed). Nonetheless, the five pieces were born rather easily and without incident, and though I still cannot account for their atypical style, there they lay in my portfolio, both parts and score, as an example that a trained composer who exhibits some degree of talent regularly can tackle almost anything at one point or another.
The years since 1990 have been a mixed compositional bag for me, devoted mostly to more work on chamber music and a return to extensive vocal and choral writing. My sessions with Bracali, though not concentrating on this genre, provided invaluable help in part-writing. Once again, as in my student days, but with somewhat more finesse, I came to the point of sometimes using adjacent voices in a choral setting to resemble instrumental tone-clusters, a technique I have experimented with regularly since my early days as an Ives aficionado. My choral works from this period include “Two Sacred Pieces” for mixed a capella chorus, one composed for a church choir and the other for a synagogue group. Both ended up informing me that they lay beyond their performers’ capabilities (and, I suspect, that of their conductors as well). These two short works waited until 2006 to be heard, when they were premiered by The Collegiate Chorale, and are included on the Albany Records CD Alan Seidler: Vocal and Choral Works (1990-2006), released in March 2009.
By early in 1995, heavily encouraged by Bracali, I decided it was time to take the plunge into my first one-man concert of ‘serious’ works, and on November 20th it took place at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall, in those days, easy and relatively cheap to book, with a standing house policy of encouraging chamber music by new composers. Sadly to say, in the next ten years, all of the above changed.
The program opened with a Sonata for Violin and Piano, composed for violinist Patmore Lewis. This work, ironically, has become the most played (both throughout America and abroad), most-recorded (at least twice of which I am aware and a possible third edition in production as of last summer), and most commercially successful of all my concert works. This despite the fact that as in my earlier Quartet for Piano and Strings, the two outer movements were inferior to the middle (slow) movement, especially the last, which was stylistically totally out of synch.
Therefore, I rearranged the slow movement to stand alone as Romanza for Violin and Piano though reliable rumors have it that the full work has continued to be performed behind my back. [Patmore, if you’d like, I’ll write you something ten times better, but in the meantime, please leave those two outer movements alone!] (I kept the Romanza as an encore piece or consolation prize for Pat because both melody and harmonies are too luscious to allow to disappear, if I must say so myself). Truth be told, one critic opined that “it seemed as if the composer wished we stood at the turn of a different century (meaning, in this case, obviously at the approach to 1900 rather than to 2000).” As the work (especially that middle movement) does contain some of my most lyrical writing as an adult, I hope that the ears of today’s concertgoers have moved beyond the idea of music as just one more narcotic, as that was most emphatically not what this composer had in mind or ever has.
The last selection was followed by another example of my lyrical side, though here there was more than enough discord and harmonically “incorrect” counterpoint to compensate. I set a text by American poet James Wright, “Complaint,” for tenor and mixed chamber ensemble in which a recently-bereaved widower mourns the loss of his long-time spouse. The lyrics were sung to great romantic and poignant effect by tenor Steven Goldstein, who would remain sufficiently involved with my newer output that I chose him as my tenor soloist in “The Mystic Trumpeter” when the much longer work was finally completed and introduced to the public in October 2006. The chamber group for “Complaint” was conducted by Maestro Richard Woitach, Associate Conductor of The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra from 1959 until his retirement in the late 1990s, and a frequent radio talk-show guest on the side.
The first half of the program concluded with another hearing of the Quartet for Piano and Strings (yes, all three movements). The performance was successful as Contemporary Music performances go. It was the work’s second hearing, a phenomenon which is rare for American music written after 1950. It had been premiered shortly after its completion in 1989, and in this instance, Maestro Woitach abandoned his podium in favor of the piano bench.
I will not make the slightest attempt to tell you what immediately followed intermission for the simple and honest reason that I don’t remember, nor can I get my hands on a program. I can, however, tell you what came next. In a skinny little book of poems by Carl Sandburg, I came across the relatively little-known poem I called ‘Playthings’, my somewhat rueful and yet whimsical contraction of Sandburg’s original Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind, which I thought might lend itself better to the type of musical setting I was formulating in my mind.
The haunting text deals with the rise and fall of civilizations since time began, each crumbling into nothingness until the next “greater” one appears to take its place. The implied theme of war and destruction was one I returned to again in several movements of “The Mystic Trumpeter,” several years later, but let me not get too far ahead of myself. Once again, Richard Woitach conducted the ensemble, now expanded by a battery of percussionists. The frequently-chilling text was sung expertly and with every ounce of dramatic flair she could muster by soprano Laura Last (another of my “regular” soloists; she repeated the performance, and performs a song-cycle commissioned specifically for her, then rounds out the Mystic Trumpeter CD as soprano soloist to Steven Goldstein’s tenor. If you are still reading and are anxious to move on you’ll have to wait just a little bit longer for the conclusion of that story, which after a brief-closing curmudgeonly rant, marks the end of the article and this chapter.
The November 1995 Merkin concert concluded with the premiere of my String Quartet #1, completed earlier that year. The work was generally well received by both its composer and his audience, the only exceptions being those of the creative artist’s eternal adversaries, the critics.
In the inner recesses of my mind, I can hear you thinking, “This Seidler guy is even more of an eccentric than he’s let us in on already. Rather than ending the chapter dealing with one specific concert with his comments on the final piece on the program, he is about to open an entirely new one (complete with pretentious subtitle) and create another opportunity to take pot-shots at the critics in the process. Maybe he can write music, but by all means, keep him away from his overblown attempts at writing prose. It’s obvious he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to organize a chapter properly and the Microsoft Word program on his PC ought to have a padlock permanently installed on it!”
At the risk of being repetitious and displaying even more egocentricity than I already have, I can only answer by stating once again that, more often than not, there is a method to my madness. I only ask the opportunity to explain myself a little more fully and some of you may finish reading the following chapter having come to agree with me, if not totally, then at least to some degree, which, of course, is better than not at all.
My String Quartet #1 is a work I feel delivers a great deal more than did the aforementioned critics who were still busily opining: “It seems that after all these years, Seidler is still looking for his own voice,” or “It is obvious that this man has yet to find a style in which he feels comfortable,” or possibly even worse, “It seems that the composer wishes we were standing on the brink of another century (the 20th) than where we find ourselves today (entering the 21st).” In all honesty, this last was said in reference to my Violin Sonata, whose flaws I have freely admitted, rather than the far-superior Quartet, but, taken as a whole, I feel justified in answering all charges with that most expressive of Anglo-Saxon rejoinders, “BULLSHIT!”
What the Arbtiters of Truth In Art have been capable of seeing only as immaturity, uncertainty, and vacillation from style to style and genre to genre is in fact, and has been, going back as far as Juilliard days nearly 100% intentional. It is my firm belief than any artist worthy of the name discards far more than he preserves over what is generally a fairly lengthy apprenticeship, and therefore he must see a certain degree of intrinsic value in what he has spared. Furthermore, who is to say that a composer must write in only one style? The very idea is ludicrous, and was it true, would stand alone in the history of the arts. Does a playwright use the same characters in all his plays throughout a lifetime? Does a painter paint only one scene on canvas over and over into eternity? Did Laurence Olivier refuse to play anything other than Hamlet because it wasn’t in his style? No, in my opinion, an ease at changing style or métier means the artist in question is capable of doing more, not less, and for this gift (and it is a gift) I have my involvement with non-Classical musical genres, the theatre, and a lifetime of improvising and imagination to thank.
The real irony of their total lack of understanding, therefore, is reflected in how close they come (totally unintentionally) to a simplistic attempt at verbalizing the artistic aims and goals of my work and my approach to achieving them, which, at the request of those who are involved in this article, will be explored in as much (or more) detail than it deserves before its conclusion, which, believe it or not, dear reader, is not far off.
