when the piano won’t speak
by
Douglas Messerli
David
Lang face so pale, a work of six pianos / presented by Piano Spheres on
YouTube, September 8, 2020
A
few days ago I had the opportunity to finally see my first musical concert
since February 2020, which must have represented the last performance this year in Los Angeles' Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The new performance, a live, on-line, rendition of David
Lang’s piece for six pianos, face so pale, featured Vicki Ray. Susan
Svrček, Sarah Gibson, Mark Robson, Thomas Kotcheff, and Gloria Chen, each
presumably playing their own pianos from their own homes.
Based, in the broadest sense, on a work by the
mid-15th century composer Guillaume Dufay—a chanson and mass, as
Lang describes it, which he drastically slowed down—the work consists primarily
of the six pianists toggling back and forth between two keys as they gradually,
in different directions, move up and down the keyboard for the work’s 8:45
minutes.
The result is not as structurally confined
or repetitious as one first might think. With six pianists, each moving along
the spectrum of the serial double-note composition, the communal sound they
achieve is a bit like quiet glass bells pulsating from a distant point in space—which
might have something to do with the fact that the piece, first released in a
recording by Piano Circus in 1993, was later performed with Brad Meyer on six
vibraphones by the UKPG.
In the piano sextet I saw, however, there
is also a slightly less ethereal quality to the acoustics. Lang reminds us that
although the piano is generally thought of as being an instrument of highly
emotional expression, that it is, nonetheless, a kind of percussion instrument
which depends upon a hammer hitting a string from which the sound vibrates.
Accordingly, he argues, there is a tension always on the piano between the ethereal
and something that is fraught or even tortured.
When Gloria Cheng, interviewing him, expressed
some of the difficulties of bringing six pianists together in a zoom-like
concert playing in their own spaces on instruments which each have a slightly
different totality, she concluded that, at times, the piano wouldn’t “speak.”
Lang smiled as if to say that was
precisely what he meant by the tortured quality of his sextet.
This became apparent even in the YouTube
concert, when one by one, the pianists dropped away, leaving finally only one,
Vicki Ray, quietly playing out the quick shifts of one note to the other. By
the time she quietly came to the composition’s end, the music appeared to be
more in the mind that in the air, as if the piano had silenced itself to be
replace by a closure of echo rather than the actual vibration of strings.
It seems to me that the tension this work
hints at between the open flow of music and its always potential absence is a
near perfect metaphor for our current time in which those of us who care about
our survival during the seemingly endless pandemic must live in somewhat
closed-off worlds, in semi-isolation. Yet, we can and do speak to one another,
even if we are in terror that suddenly our voices might no longer be heard.
Los
Angeles, September 12, 2020
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2020).
