Derek Bermel: Soul Garden
by Mic Holwin
liner notes for Emergency Music/CRI 895 (June 2002)
Derek Bermel can make instruments sing. He can make them talk. Laugh. Scream. Sigh. A composer who is also a first-rate clarinetist, Bermel has an exquisite ability to capture the spirit of the human voice in his music.
Equally at ease in a New York City nightclub or a dusty village in West Africa and with akin enthusiasm for rap, Messaien, klezmer or Monk, Bermel is comfortable with any manifestation of the human soul. This naturalness in embracing our variegated humanity is perhaps what enables him to write such compelling music--music in which "each note counts," as New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini wrote of a Bermel piece.
Performed by Bermel on the clarinet, along with cellist Fred Sherry, pianist Christopher Taylor, the Borromeo String Quartet, violist Paul Neubauer and others, and elegantly recorded by producer Judy Sherman, these eight works present, for the first time, an overview of Bermel's small-ensemble writing.
Soul Garden is an album of consistently engaging chamber works--clean, smart and unique music. Bermel's is a garden in which to linger.
Like generations of American musicians before him, Bermel has been deeply inspired by African-American music: jazz, blues, R&B and hip-hop have all influenced his writing. Gospel music especially is a cornerstone in many of Bermel's works, including the two which begin and end this disc.
Soul Garden (2000), for solo viola, two violins, viola and two cellos, and Quartet ("I'm Going Down to the Valley") (1992), for string quartet, are one-movement works that evoke the human voice.
Soul Garden and the Quartet take place in a world where definite meets indefinite, where tonality converges with music created from sliding pitches. Both works employ precisely defined glissandi, quarter-tones and techniques such as stomping and striking the body of the instruments--European methods to suggest an improvisational style. Substituting a quarter-tone for its corresponding chromatic counterpoint "connotes an emotional, even sensual, inflection," writes Bermel.
Seizing on string instruments' ability to slide between notes, Bermel creates a burnished alto gospel singer from a viola, a rumbling church baritone from a cello. His choice of lead instrument in these two pieces is not coincidence. "The viola is neither the high nor the low," Bermel muses. "It's everyman and everywoman."
Bermel was struck by the a cappella "Doctor Jesus" sections from George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. "I wondered what the result would be if I attempted to notate some of the inflections characteristic of gospel music, subtleties which Gershwin left to the singers," writes Bermel. "So I wrote a melody with 'dummy' words, 'I'm Going Down to the Valley.'" (One can hear a brief tribute to "Doctor Jesus" about two and three-quarter minutes through: the cello plays tremolo while viola and violin "sing" lead in an a cappella style.)
The melting tension in both of these string works stems from "the rub," as Bermel calls the use of African pentatonic scale against European diatonic scale. "Harmonic tension in gospel music can result from the singer's non-diatonic note choices alongside the church organist's chords," he explains. "Without that juxtaposition, you won't feel the rub."
Melodically and harmonically rooted at first, Soul Garden and the Quartet slowly move away from their tonal centers. By the viola cadenza of Soul Garden, the glue holding the piece together is gesture, an element paramount in all Bermel works. Each gesture can be traced back to the viola's opening motive--Bermel's "tribute to Beethoven." There is tribute to Bach as well: the dialogue that unfolds in the cadenza invokes both call-and-response in gospel music and Bach's multi-dimensional solo writing.
The very opening of a Bermel piece often contains the key to the whole. Each work's unique "world" is defined at the outset and the piece grows from that opening melodic or gestural seed. In both Soul Garden and the Quartet, that nugget of material is an achingly human viola phrase. By hearing just the first bar of the Quartet (C-E quarter-tone flat-F), for example, "you already know that the world you've entered is not quite diatonic," says Bermel, "or else the violist must be really out of tune!"
Soul Garden was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and is based on a movement of Messengers, an earlier dance piece composed for the British company Jazz Xchange. The Quartet is dedicated to Bill Albright, Bermel's composition teacher at the time he wrote the piece. Albright died young, just a few years later, and Bermel now hears the Quartet as a eulogy (note the heavenly harmonic "amen" that ends the piece).
Many of Bermel's pieces employ harmonic development that moves by minor third (or by a tritone--two stacked minor thirds). The minor third is a "particularly emotional interval" for Bermel and one, he notes, that is intrinsic to the blues. Both Soul Garden and the Quartet use the minor third as a pivot, as do a pair of two-movement works, Wanderings (1994), for woodwind quintet, and SchiZm (1994), for clarinet and piano.
Commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony and written for young players, Wanderings conjures the atmosphere and energy of Jerusalem's Old City and a West African village. The movements are "two distinct ways of imagining the woodwind quintet," says Bermel.
"Gift of Life," the first movement, presents three main portraits of Jerusalem's Old City, where Muslim and Jewish quarters exist side by side: a "dark, severe" opening using rooted fifths and the octatonic scale; a calmer flute cadenza over a drone; and a loose "klezmer-tango" by clarinet, horn and boozy bassoon. Moods and styles shift abruptly, but the melodies, based on common material, weave together into a musical whole. Bermel writes:
Strolling between the Wailing Wall and the Arab Market, the outsider may find a peculiar fascination with the interaction of these worlds whose fates history has inextricably twisted together. There are no absolute boundaries; those that are identified exist largely through a mix of tradition, community and fear. Similarly, the musical threads of continuity appear and suddenly vanish, remaining elusive.
The second movement, "Two Songs from Nandom," transports the listener to Ghana, where Bermel studied traditional Lobi xylophone (gyil). Gyil music, found in northwestern Ghana, southern Burkina Faso and northeastern Ivory Coast, informs several of Bermel's works, including Turning, a solo piano work on this disc, and Dust Dances, a 1994 work for orchestra. An eighteen-key instrument resembling a Western marimba, the gyil is constructed from tuned slabs of carved mahogany bound with animal hide to a wood frame. Each key has its own gourd resonator; crushed spiderwebs are seared with rubber over holes carved in the gourd, creating a buzzing membrane as keys are struck. During a typical session, two gyil players and a drummer may string together and combine songs, sometimes for more than an hour. Following are the stories surrounding the two intertwined songs, as related by Bermel's gyil teacher Bernard Woma:
Kola Per Bir, jo kol' no op
The cat fell asleep under a tree; his enemy the mouse saw his opportunity, and bit the cat's testicle, whereupon the cat promptly died.
Baatazaa, ne no ne pulle; Baatazaa, fu ir ben kume.
Baatazaa, you have so many women; Baatazaa, please give me one.
(Baatazaa is a great chief.)
Bermel incorporates the rhythmic complexity and melodic counterpoint of Lobi music into Western harmonic and formal structures. Layered pentatonic scales approximate the tuning of the gyil, while overlapping duple and triple meters allow for a flexible beat that suggests other pulses and polyrhythms. Multiphonics in the double reeds combine with stopped horn and flutter-tongue in the flute and clarinet to simulate the buzz of the xylophone's spiderwebs.
Like Wanderings, SchiZm for clarinet and piano (which also exists in an oboe and piano version) juxtaposes two movements in contrasting moods. The first movement, "Field of Stars," opens peacefully with the piano as a sensuous clarinet melody twists around it. Bermel describes the composition as "a short musical puzzle comprising three metric cycles (clarinet, piano left hand, piano right hand) that come together every sixty beats and which define the harmonic structure."
"Puppet State," the second movement, similarly weaves connections between different meters; however, this time the material juxtaposed is a patchwork of fragments in various styles. Alternating and sometimes mixing with a tentative salsa, the "klezmer-tango" reappears briefly here (to be resurrected further on as a limping "Habanera"-like tango). As in many of Bermel's works, both players' parts are fiendishly difficult to execute convincingly; the wide range of emotion and style demands a high level of virtuosity from the performers.
A similar degree of virtuosity is required for Coming Together (1999), for clarinet and cello, and Theme and Absurdities (1993), for solo clarinet. Coming Together is a quintessential Bermel work: humorous, gesture-based and demonstrating a keen ear for invoking the human voice. Commissioned by the Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center and Merkin Hall for Bermel and Fred Sherry (who perform it on this disc), this short duo consists entirely of glissandi. Says Bermel, "I wanted to write a piece without any 'straight' pitches, one which relied solely on gestural development, yet which would still be convincing and emotional." Bermel achieves this by specifying exactly where each pitch starts and ends and where each glissando occurs in time--this careful placement of tonal areas defines the structure and carries the piece forward.
As in Soul Garden or the Quartet, the playing field is defined in the first gesture of Coming Together: a low cello moan--uhhhh. The cello catches the clarinet's attention with bold pizzicati, the clarinet squawks in protest, the cellist petulantly drops his bow and lets it bounce on the strings (col legno battuto). At first distant in pitch and gesture, the two partners slowly converge, moving closer in range and rhythmic intensity. They seem to unconsciously mimic each other. Intense stroking by the cello incites the clarinet to high shrieks. The intimacy becomes disarming, like enduring the sound of cats in heat in the yard next door or overhearing a frisky couple in an adjoining hotel room.
By the end, the instruments have indeed come together--disparate lines have converged to a single point, and they groan in rhythmic unison. A husky-voiced clarinet produces a ripping multiphonic; difference tones emerge from the combined growl of the two instruments. The tryst ends with another col legno battuto.
Theme and Absurdities is another humorously virtuosic piece, this time for solo clarinet and performed here by the composer. Writes Bermel:
It's a spoof on all those loveable yet undeniably annoying theme and variations pieces based on some aria. A whole bunch of these were written for clarinet between about 1850 and 1930, and they make great encore pieces. This one is a particularly nightmarish tribute to the genre. The variations are served up in eight-bar chunks, growing steadily in ridiculousness.
Once again the nugget of the piece is contained in the opening phrase. The theme written by Bermel is complex-- certainly unsingable with its large seventh jumps--and almost as absurd as the eleven "absurdities" (and coda) that follow.
Bermel employs a huge pitch range in Theme and Absurdities; at one point the clarinet ekes out a high D. Daring three-octave leaps are taken, technique itself becomes a subject of ridicule (chromatic runs, flutter-tonguing, notes jam-packed into a few measures), and directionality (in this recording's case, stereo) is added in the coda as the clarinet is unceremoniously waved from side to side. The variations end with a quote from Also sprach Zarathustra--a fitting bit of pomposity for the whole endeavor.
Virtuosity is also a requirement for Turning (1995), Bermel's first major solo piano work. This six-section theme and variations was written at the Tanglewood Music Center, where Bermel worked with and befriended the French composer Henri Dutilleux. The piece is dedicated to him and to pianist Christopher Taylor, who premiered the work in Paris.
Turning opens with a simple and sober "made-up Protestant hymn tune" in the key of B major. The hymn is followed by a pentatonic echo in the piano's high register, "a mirror of my musical consciousness--East versus West--when I returned from Africa," Bermel writes. The development of the hymn becomes more and more Romantic until the ghost of Rachmaninoff himself seems to haunt the premises, only to retreat back into the shadows.
"Nightmares and Chickens," the first variation, follows. Here the hymn is, as says Bermel, "pecked" out, culminating in "a schizoid frenzy of pointillistic clucking" that he composed using serial methods. "Itchy, uncomfortable" high notes wedge themselves between snippets of the theme before the movement "evaporates" into the top register of the piano.
"Kowie at Dawn," the second variation, is a portrait of a small Sissala village in Northwest Ghana. It starts peacefully with the sound of distant bells, but soon the town wakes and we are drawn into a lively dance, again evocative of Lobi xylophone music.
Next is a brief "Passage," perhaps through water, as polytonal arpeggios sweep impressionistically over blocks of chords, patiently seeking the opening "Song for B." We are almost back on dry land when the hymn emerges like Debussy's cathedrale from the fog. This time, however, it is tinged with blues, as though heard at a late-night piano lounge bar.
Ragtime meets a South American street fair in a sprightly and humorous fourth variation, "Carnaval Noir." A rag reminiscent of Joplin or Bolcom leads to insistent chords in the bass that interrupt the festivities and finally quash them, as the piano's uppermost register is ignited by the bass's anxiety.
"Carnaval" segues into a Coda, in which an almost Cubist rendition of the hymn is played very quietly in the top registers of the piano. The pentatonic echo returns as "the work spirals backwards," describes Bermel, "into a hazy reflection of the opening song."
An early work rounds out the album. Mulatash Stomp (1991), for violin, clarinet and piano, was composed while Bermel was a student in Ann Arbor. He writes:
While I was working on the piece, Bill Albright mentioned that he had once spent a wild evening at an all-night "Mulatas" (the authentic Hungarian spelling) and the idea stuck in my mind. Having never been to a true Mulatas--and to make sure it got pronounced correctly--I called my second-hand piece "Mulatash" and wove a techno-rhythm into the mix for some added late-nite American spice.
Mulatash Stomp pairs a "Bohemian" theme with Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony and a modern "house" dance beat. It starts off playfully but winds up in some thick woods, with ominous harmonies and dramatic violin phrasing reminiscent of Piazzolla's dark tango quintets.
The Mozartian theme first appears as a ponderous piano line in sixths before reappearing in various levels of adulteration--directly quoted, broken into pieces, turned on its head in Bartokian spirit, woven into several different beat structures--by the trio. After the entrance of a second two-note motive, the "Jupiter" theme becomes bold and emphatic, played by the violin over a piano "house" beat that is rendered so slowly as to be almost unrecognizable. As the work closes, though, the "house" beat is liberated to the high registers of the piano and sped up to its characteristically frenetic tempo. Everyone stomps their feet at the end--a "mulatash" stomp, one would surmise.
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