Bach Meets the Summer of Love

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by Allan Appel | Aug 16, 2007 9:04 am

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Posted to: Arts

bach%20002.JPG The 1960s and the 1760s were alive and well, cool and contemplative, in a musical program complete with projected video graphics that danced to the sounds of a John Cage/Philip Glass-type minimalist composition written in the “Summer of Love,” 1967.

The composition shared the program with an equally minimalist take on the opening chorale of Bach’s great motet, Jesu Meine Freude, written more than 200 summers previous.

The maestro for both was this man, Richard Gard, director of music at Saint Thomas More Chapel at Yale, on Park Street. The scene of the “happening” was the chapel’s Thomas Golden Center, a sunny, woodsy, windows-everywhere room, like a living room under the sky, where local singers, instrumentalists, and members of the public gathered on Wednesday evening for a kind of minimalist hootenanny, but with sounds, and without words.

“Well, it is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, more or less” said Gard, a genial and energetic man who is also the director of several area choirs and on the faculty of Naugatuck Valley Community College. The main piece he chose was “Under C,” composed 40 years ago by Terry Riley, a disciple of Cage and Glass, in the composition of aleatory (from the Latin for dice) music—that is music the heart of whose structure or non-structure is randomness and chance. Calling it, as an homage to Riley, “In C,” Gard adapted and shortened Riley’s piece from about an hour and a half to 16 minutes.

bach%20001.JPG Instrumentalists and singers, such as soprano Jenny Dickson-Cizik and bass Norman Schain, also sang a Gard composition called “My Indeterminate Joy,” an aleatory on seven sections of the opening chorale of the Bach motet. In the Riley variation players work their way, on their own, through 22 fragments or sections meeting up, that is holding or hurrying, at each of four junctures where Gard hit a gong and cymbals.

In the Bach, there were seven sections the players worked their way through; after entering on the conductor’s cue, they sing independently. In both, an overall form is amazingly produced out of congenial randomness, like, to use Gard’s words, “evolving leaves and branches eventually make a certain recognizable kind of tree.”

Gard recalled the compositions from the 1960s by Cage, one in which the player simply sits for four minutes and 33 seconds at the piano and does nothing, then rises, and leaves; and a piano piece in which the sole instructions are to bang on the piano, pluck a string now and then, drop a piece of wood on it and so on. “The idea of this music,” Gard said, “is that the joy is in the trip, not the meaning or destination.”

bach%20003.JPG Gard’s wife Evelyn, pictured here with him and with Father John Young of St. Thomas More, said, “If you like blessed cacophony, you’ll love this.”

Indeed Father Young likened the first piece, “In C,” to a kind of meditation. “It’s different from Catholic meditation, where you focus on a text, a word, a phrase, a whole sentence and strive for a divine union. Here, it was easier to meditate, to concentrate. I immersed myself in the organic feeling of all these people making sounds around me.”

Gard was particularly proud of Father Young’s participation. He said he had designed his keyboard so that a non-instrumentalist, like Young, could simply press a key, on which the fragment of sound to be played was recorded. “Then all he had to do was move the switch up and down for volume variation.”

Young said that he was at first worried he’d do the wrong thing, but as Gard had tried to eliminate chance in this instance, it was pretty easy. “The longer the piece went on,” said Young, “the more immersed I became, and the more contemplative.”

Gard, who has performed these pieces before, said he was delighted, yet surprised by the large turnout, about 100 people. “I was hoping for more echo,” he said, “and you don’t get that with so many people. The bodies absorb the echo.” Before the performance, Schain and Dickson-Cizik (the two singers above) both said they really loved the motet, its spaciousness for contemplativeness, in Schain’s phrase. The soprano, however, expressed some concern how it would come out as they were about to sing it in a round, as if Jesu Meine Freude were to be treated like Row Row Row Your Boat. Gard’s own composition, or his variant of the Riley piece, at least by measure of the applause, seemed to be better appreciated than the Bach.

bach%20004.JPG And what about these audience members, (left to right) Dan Bianchini, Karolina Wojteczko, and Anne Storz, of Hamden? Were they in deep contemplation or asleep or in the zone or tripping, man?

Well, Bianchini, who’s from Prospect, said he enjoyed it all thoroughly especially as he’d just taken a course in electronic music. Wojteczka, recently here from Poland and part of Gard’s following from Naugatuck Valley Community College, sang happily as a soprano.

Storz was especially ecstatic. “I really loved it,” she said. “I was just seeing colors. When my thoughts began to intrude, I just tried to move them out, and go back to the colors.” Hey, are the ‘60s alive or what!

bach%20005.JPG

Even the hard-working musicians, such as trumpeter Ray Nilson of Seymour, became poetic in a synesthesiac sort of way, mixing the auditory and the visual in finding language to describe the experience. “The beauty was in the confusion of it all,” he said. “Like a Jackson Pollock painting.” Do the ‘60s live or what!

For information regarding future programs organized by Gard at the Golden Center, click here.

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