Photo: from AtaXia.

There is a long tradition of work fascinated by difference: last month’s Einstein on the Beach, is based on the writings of Christopher Knowles, an autistic poet, and collaborator of Robert Wilson. In AtaXia, a sci-art dance he created in 2004 by Wayne McGregor, disability and bodily difference emerge as formal movement principles, and create a new attention to different ways of being in space.

McGregor choreographed AtaXia after an eight-month research fellowship at the experimental psychology department at Cambridge. Merging scientific research and movement research, he based the dance on the disorder named by its title. McGregor, a group of neuroscientists, Sarah Seddon Jenner who has an ataxic movement disorder, and Random Dance’s troupe of well-trained, professional dancers all worked together to choreograph a dance based on a medical condition which disrupts movement, and overloads nerves.

And it is not just the bodies that play with disruption, starts, stops, overload: AtaXia’s stage has a mirroring backdrop, multiplying the movements and bodies on stage. The bodies flash in costumes shot through with fiber-optics, lighting up movements and speed. In the patterns of the dance, an arm’s arc gets arrested, thrashes, hacks at the air.

Curiosity and both scientific and artistic research shaped the creation of the piece. Jenner describes her interaction with the company:

I came back for a 135 minute question and answer session with the company, during which we covered many of the things they had learned in the research context, as well as working through some of their own observations about movement, dysfunction, and how bodies cope with impairment.

The whole piece really started to make sense to me, though, after a rehearsal I did with the company during which one of the dancers (Leila Dalio) and I worked through some choreographic exercises.

The whole company, including Wayne, was in the room, but they all appeared to be working intently on their own material. I was concentrating on lasting three hours without a) forgetting my movements; b) injuring Leila by leaning on her too much; and c) falling over. So, I didn’t realize until I saw the finished dance how carefully I’d been observed.

Some examples of ways I move that made it into the finished piece. I scoot on my backside along the floor rather than stand to move from one place to another. I touch people and things not so much to bear weight as to help orient myself relative to them. As I get tired, I lean on others for support and more often than not, I get that support.

In her discussion with me, Jenner mentions that her contact with the dancers taught her important information as she continues to adjust to living with ataxia: the information reflected back to her by the trained bodies of dancers, well-used to picking up unusual movement information and structuring it. Through these translatory processes, Jenner’s embodiment echoes back to her across the image of the dancers on stage – a new image of her own movement quality emerges for her.

Jenner shared with me her emotions about experiencing her movement mirrored back to her. Mainstream aesthetics see disability so often only as a tragedy, as something to be overcome (and this attitude is easily internalized). In this collaborative research process, her condition became the source of exciting movement patterns, of intriguing human difference.

PK: What did YOU learn about your own movement by watching the dancers in the performance? Did anything surprise you? What and why?

SSJ: There are specific gestures in AtaXia that are typical of those with neurological impairments that I despise catching myself make, and I surprised myself with how negative and judgmental I feel about them. (Specifically, jerky arm gestures and the tendency to hold the arm close to the body, fully flexed at wrist and elbow). One dancer explained that the shame and hostility I associate with those movements are learned social responses and that they are not intrinsic to the movement. It was all I could do not to snap back, “I hate them anyway.” I find that now that I’ve seen them performed, the sting has gone out of those gestures and I don’t even mind seeing them in the mirror.

Some critics call Wayne McGregor’s choreographies distant, or cool. As I give myself to his intricate spectacles, I remember the empowering effects of movement research on Jenner, and enjoy the play with the movement differences our world has to offer.

Editor’s Note: Wayne McGregor and Random Dance come to Ann Arbor to perform Far on February 19, 2012.

Let’s start with the gruesome facts associated with the composer at the center of the night’s program. Carlo Gesualdo (1566?–1613), the nephew of Counter Reformation enforcer Carlo Borromeo, was a prince and landholder in Venosa in southeastern Italy. Around 1588 his wife, the noblewoman Donna Maria d’Avalos, began an affair with a gentleman in the vicinity. In 1590 Gesualdo, using wooden copies of room keys he had had made, found the pair in bed together, stabbed them both, and hung their corpses in front of his castle for all to see. The story was retold repeatedly by poets of the day in a sixteenth-century equivalent of headline news.

Gesualdo, as a nobleman, was immune to prosecution, although he had plenty to fear from the relatives of his wife and her lover. He was never arrested, but he spent most of the rest of his life either on the road, investigating new musical developments, or, later on, locked up in his castle, writing music for concerts at which he himself was the audience.

The madrigals he wrote during his later years lay buried for three hundred years, but they fascinated musical modernists who unearthed them. Filled with hyper-expressive settings of texts about searing jealousy and betrayal, they seemed to push the boundaries of dissonance that was possible under the rules of Renaissance polyphony, and to anticipate music that was centuries in the future. The first performers of the madrigals, in fact, were mostly not early music specialists but the group of performers led by Robert Craft, the prominent American champion of Igor Stravinsky’s music.

Gesualdo wrote less sacred music, but the Tenebrae Reponsories (“tenebrae” means “shadows” and refers to Christian services celebrated in the days before Easter; a responsory is a setting of a text that contains an answering section) that he composed at the end of his life are among his very greatest works. In these pieces the thorny question of how Gesualdo’s life and music are related reaches an especially sharp point. Consider this setting of “O vos omnes” composed by Gesualdo in 1611, two years before his death:

“O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte si est dolor similis sicut dolor meus,” says the responsory text—”O you who walk down the road, pay attention and see whether there is any sorrow like my sorrow.” The text comes from the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah and originally described the sack of Jerusalem in the sixth century B.C.E. It was repurposed for the Passion story. But it’s hard not to think of Gesualdo himself as the subject when the words “similis sicut dolor meus” are repeated in tonal regions unthinkably distant from the piece’s home base.

*****

Was Gesualdo really a renegade as well as a murderer? Was he even a “modernist” of his time? Some would say no — his chromaticism did not lead to a new language but only explored the strangest corners of an old one. The truly new music of the first decade of the 1600s was opera, which he did not touch. Gesualdo’s music was closed up in an emotional hothouse, and one word that’s been used to describe it is Mannerist — looked at from a certain angle, the jarring contrasts in his works were musical equivalents of El Greco’s light and shade. Or perhaps his artistic counterpart was Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Italian who painted surreal human heads made up of vegetables, plants, and even books.

Photo: Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus.

What is a renegade, anyway? Does change in the arts come from an avant-garde, or does it bubble up from below? Do musical traditions tend to shock most when they begin, or when they’re coming to an end?

Whatever your ultimate answers to these questions may be, the music of Don Carlo Gesualdo has lost none of its ability to shock as it enters its fifth century of existence. If you’ve never heard Gesualdo at all, or if you know him only through the few tortured madrigals that circulate among college singing groups, hear how the language of his last years was refracted through sacred texts in the magnificent Tenebrae Responsories, somber Holy Week thoughts from a prince whose life and music intertwined in profound ways.

Chinese music is based on pentatonic scales. Most European scales have seven notes, but the pentatonic only has five. The pentatonicscale can be demonstrated by playing the five black keys in an octave on the piano.

Many instruments were brought to China from Central Asia by way of the Silk Road, but the form these instruments have now assumed is uniquely Chinese.

The Zheng was developed during the second half of the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BCE). It is shaped like a large trapezoid, with 13-21 strings that a musician plucks with picks attached to their fingers. It sounds and functions much like a harp, played horizontally rather than vertically.

The Dizi is of Han origin (206 BCE- 220 AD). It is a traditional bamboo flute with six finger holes and a blowhole. The blowhole has a kazoo-like membrane covering it that vibrates when the instrument is played, creating a buzz that accompanies the instrument’s hollow sounding tone.

The word Erhu literally translates to a “stringed instrument adopted from the northwestern barbarians of antiquity,” which suggests that it developed during the Tang or the Song Dynasty. It is a twostringed fiddle, which is played with a bow with strings made of silk. At the time of its conception, it was considered a “folk” instrument, which was not worthy of court music. The Erhu has an open, smooth sound.

The Pipa is a “pear-shaped” lute, modified from Central Asian instruments, particularly those in Iran. It is possible that Japanese dignitaries brought it to China in the seventh or eighth century. A member of the lute family, the Pipa sounds and is played much like a modern-day guitar.

Adapted from UMS Education & Community Engagement Teacher Resource Guide, distributed to teachers in conjunction with UMS Youth Performances.

Trio di Clarone, from left: Reiner Wehle, Sabine Meyer, Wolfgang Meyer

After I finished my undergraduate music degree at Western Michigan University in the late 1990’s, I studied in Europe with German clarinetist Wolfgang Meyer. I had long enjoyed his recordings and desired to learn from his traditional German approach. It was a wonderful experience to be his student for nearly two years at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Karsruhe.

Professor Meyer was an inspiring teacher. He could always demonstrate whatever piece of music I was working on just as fluently as if he were to perform it that evening. Despite the fact that his career took him all over the world, he still was very available to his students. One way he achieved that was to teach performance practice by actually performing alongside his students. Professor Meyer regularly played the bass clarinet, together with me and some other students, in a clarinet sextet. He booked us all sorts of gigs, and we played in small castles and on the radio. Once we even performed on television at the German Supreme Court. This much access to my teacher was important for me as I learned the ropes as a young performer.

I will never forget the first time I had a concert with Professor Meyer. In fact, it happened by accident. It was my first performance in Germany, just a couple weeks after my arrival. Professor Meyer arranged a house concert and I was to perform some chamber music.

Professor Meyer drove the violist, the cellist, and me to the venue. There was no room in the car for the violinist, so he had to make the 30-mile trip by train. We waited for quite some time, but the violinist didn’t come. Later we learned he had actually traveled to the wrong town, one that happened to have the same name! I couldn’t believe what happened next. Wolfgang grabbed the violin part, tied a reed to his clarinet, and nodded toward stage, “OK, let’s go.” “Let’s go where?” I thought. Before I had time to process what was happening, he had given the cue to begin. He read at sight the violin part while transposing at the same time. I was beside myself. Not only did he perform beautifully, never missing a single note, he playfully tossed embellishments for me to mimic. The patrons were thrilled with the concert, having heard some beautiful pieces while hosting a celebrity performer in their home

Three basset horns.

Professor Meyer takes pleasure in playing different types of clarinets. Together with his sister, Sabine Meyer, and her husband Reiner Wehle, he performs basset horn music in Trio di Clarone. A modern basset horn looks like a little bass clarinet. It is a clarinet pitched in F, hence the word “horn” in its name. “Basset” means it has an extension that permits it to plunge deeply into the bass clef.

The basset horn was popular beginning in the late eighteenth century and was prominent for about a hundred years thereafter. Its melancholically vocal quality in the upper register, along with its throaty bass notes, made this instrument one of Mozart’s favorites. It is a critical instrument in his final, unfinished work, the Requiem. It would be hard to imagine this funereal music without the somber timbre of the basset horn. Mozart did explore the lighter side of the instrument, however, having written them prominently into the famous Gran Partita Serenade, K361. Other composers to write for the basset horn were Beethoven, Mendelsohn, and Richard Strauss.

Trio di Clarone has reintroduced the basset horn to the public, which rarely gets a chance to hear this difficult instrument performed with such refinement. Audiences are in for a real treat when Trio di Clarone performs in Ann Arbor’s Rackham Auditorium on Saturday, February 4th. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, January 29, 4PM at Hill Auditorium.

Tell us what you thought! This is the place to comment on the performance and talk to other people about what you saw and heard. Don’t forget to click the option to be notified when new comments are posted.

Much like his Oiseaux Exotique (Exotic Birds), From the Canyons To The Stars pits a solo piano against a larger chamber ensemble complimented by an expansive percussion section. The music embodies Messiaen’s natural subjects with varying levels of transparency. There are woodwind lines that artfully reflect the bird calls Messiaen must have encountered on his travels, while wind machines and thunder sheets provide a more literal – yet, nonetheless artificial – connection to the vast landscapes featured on the composer’s journey through the American West.

To me, the piano soloist feels like a portrayal of Messiaen the traveler, at moments participating in the environment around it, but often observing at a distance and, more than once, meditating privately through extended candenzas. There are other soloists in the work, but, perhaps because Messiaen was a legendary pianist/organist, none succeed as well at illustrating the imagination of the journeying composer beholding, for the first time, the impossible beauty of locations like Bryce Canyon and Zion Park.

Throughout the work, listeners are treated to Messiaen’s impeccable sense of orchestration. He was a synesthete, which means he associated specific sounds with specific colors. Therefore, the harmonies and instrumentation of any moment in this work are most likely representations of the sounds that filled Messiaen’s heads when he took in the sandstone rock formations of western Utah. The eighth movement, in particular, is a voyage in the ensemble’s color, as static musical material progresses slowly through time, evolving ever so slightly through its instrumentation.

Any American history buff can see the symmetry in Messiaen’s participation in the nation’s bicentennial. After all, French support was crucial to our victory in the American Revolution. In the early 19^th Century, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville traveled America and studied our society to produce Democracy In America, which remains a highly regarded analysis of American culture and politics. I believe Messiaen’s journey across the Atlantic is related to this tradition because many moments in From The Canyons To The Stars (the very beginning of the work, the string harmonies at the end of movement ten, etc.) sound like a distillation of the idyllic and populist music of earlier American composers such as Aaron Copland and Charles Ives.

As From The Canyons To The Stars glistens into its final silence Sunday night, I imagine you will feel, as I do, that Messiaen’s music – through his distant, personal lens – captures something very true about the grandeur and vividness of the American spirit. Though Messiaen limited his ‘fieldwork’ to Utah’s national parks, his music possesses a richly varied texture such that each movement, almost every moment of the piece is an individual experience. This manifoldness reflects the diversity of dreams we champion as Americans, and is something to celebrate and savor Sunday when the Hamburg Symphony performs this astounding composition.

Composer Philip Glass: “As I worked on Einstein on the Beach, I began to see Einstein as a poet.” (Interestingly, Glass sees himself as “kind of a failed scientist.” He admits he wanted to be three things as a kid: musician, scientist, dancer. Of the three, he became just one.) Glass also notes that Einstein was the first scientist to become a celebrity.

Physicist Sean Carroll, of the California Institute of Technology: Einstein’s theories changed the definition of time. They taught us that “everybody’s watch reads personally.”

Theoretical physicist Michael S. Turner, of the University of Chicago: “Einstein changed the way we think about something that was very basic—space and time.” Turner teaches a course on Einstein and relativity. The gist of the course, Turner says, can be summed up in two sentences: “Space is flexible.” “Time warps.”

On those last two sentences, here’s UM’s Martin Walsh, a theater professor at the Residential College, on the time-warping experience of watching Einstein on the Beach at the Power Center on Friday night:

Olivier Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars), commissioned to commemorate America’s bicentennial, was inspired the by the American West. Conductor Jeffrey Tate and the Hamburg Symphony, in collaboration with Israeli filmmaker Daniel Landau, bring the piece alive in a new cinematic installation, where images of man’s impact on the environment create a counterpoint to sounds of untouched nature.

UMS video producer and filmmaker Sophia Kruz interviewed Daniel Landau over Skype.

UMS recommends watching these videos Full Screen at 1080p.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Explore more examples of Daniel Landau’s recent experimental theater and film work.