[Dixielandjazz] Sex & Jazz - Sex & Music

[Stephen Barbone]

We always knew jazz was sex music but check this out. Don't give up on
this article too soon. Be sure to get about halfway through where you
find the music in the "penis poems".

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

May 29, 2004

Sex and Romanticism? A Composer Dares All

By ANNE MIDGETTE

      The composer David Del Tredici was sitting in his studio in the
West Village, surrounded by his eclectic collection of art, musical
scores and various objets, talking about taboos. "I didn't know you
could actually consider it composing," he said. "It was so forbidden."

Sounds spicy. But the forbidden thing he was referring to is nothing
more risqué than simple tonality, the underpinning of much of Western
music. For a period in the second half of the 20th century, tonality was
anathema to serious composers.

His mention of the forbidden has nothing to do with "Wondrous the
Merge," his setting for baritone and string quartet of a poem by James
Broughton about the love affair between a professor and a student, both
male. "Wondrous the Merge" created a stir when the Great Lakes Chamber
Music Festival presented its premiere last summer, minus a chunk of its
text. The words were deemed too explicit for a family audience.

Mr. Del Tredici, 67, whose new cycle, "On Wings of Song," is a
centerpiece of the 20th-anniversary gala of the Riverside Opera Ensemble
at Merkin Concert Hall tonight, has a lot of fun flirting with the
forbidden. His maverick trajectory led him from atonality to tonality,
unheard-of in the 1970's, when he began a 20-year focus on setting texts
from Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland."

The way Mr. Del Tredici deals with homosexuality in his art is perfectly
in line with the antic, over-the-top joie de vivre that makes his
"Alice" pieces such a delight. His flicks of archness in no way diminish
the quality of his work. Indeed, he is, or has been, one of the United
States' most acclaimed composers: a former composer in residence with
the New York Philharmonic and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. But he
has always
enjoyed (in every sense) a certain notoriety, at least since introducing
tonality into his work in "Final Alice" (the mid-70's).

"The thing that's interesting for me as a composer, and I think for a
lot of composers, is to do the thing which has not been done," he said.
"It's a thrill to go where nobody's gone."

Right now, that new direction is the open celebration of what used to be
known as the love that dare not speak its name. Arch euphemism, alas, is
the only way to mention in a family newspaper some of the texts Mr. Del
Tredici is setting .

Parterre Box, at www.parterre.com, the Web publication that bills itself
as "the queer opera zine," quotes a singer who had read the text of
"Wondrous the Merge" as saying, "It all depends on how this is set."

If the notes were high, he said, "I'd modify that `e' vowel anyway, so
it would sound like I was drinking `salmon' " — not semen.

Another new cycle is titled "My Favorite Penis Poems." (A sculpture of a
penis sits atop Mr. Del Tredici's piano, like a muse.) In his quest for
financing for it, he has approached unlikely sources like the Museum of
Sex in Manhattan and Pfizer, the maker of Viagra. But he can't get the
songs performed. Maybe it is Allen Ginsberg's "Please Master," a long
and very explicit sex scene, that puts people off.

"You can't say those words," Mr. Del Tredici said in a stage whisper,
pantomiming the horror of would-be presenters. "Some of my best songs
are in the penis poems," he added ruefully.

The explicit focus on homosexuality in Mr. Del Tredici's work began in
the mid-1990's, after personal crises: losing a lover to AIDS and
battling alcoholism. After a weeklong workshop led by Body Electric, a
school based in Oakland, Calif., that explores the uses of erotic energy
in healing, Mr. Del Tredici returned to Yaddo, the artists' colony in
Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where he had a residency. Then he began setting
poems that
other participants had written during the workshop.

"Suddenly I was writing with such speed and ease that it shocked me," he
said. "I had a sense of what it must have been like for Schubert. It was
just pouring out of me. I'd write a song a day, and I liked it, that's
what was so amazing."

The first song he set was later incorporated into "Gay Life," a large
piece he did for the San Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the
conductor, had asked him to write a piece that wasn't based on "Alice"
texts, but even in San Francisco, "Gay Life," which had its premiere in
2001, must have been a little more than the orchestra had bargained for.
The experience was difficult on both sides.

"I think there was a lot of resistance to it because of the subject
matter," Mr. Del Tredici said. "When you get right to the inner workings
of a symphony, it's very conservative. At one point, I was asked if I
would mind changing the name to `San Francisco Songs.' " Of course, he
did mind, and the work had its premiere in its entirety.

As campy as Mr. Del Tredici likes to act, it is a striking demonstration
of the field's conservatism that in this day and age his work can elicit
such shock. "Wondrous the Merge," the censored work from last summer, is
a moving love poem, and most of it is not even sexual. The one sex scene
is couched in perfectly ordinary language: "He seasoned my mouth,
sweetened my neck, coddled my nipple, nuzzled my belly," and so on,
southward, to the phallus and groin. And the unperformable "Penis Poems"
are all settings of the works of legitimate poets, from Rumi to
Ginsberg.

"I wanted to create works that celebrated being gay, since there are
almost none," Mr. Del Tredici said. "Classical music is the last to move
there. Think of people like Ginsberg. What was happening while Ginsberg
was doing his stuff? We were involved in the most abstract kind of
Schoenbergian atonalism: the opposite."

But it isn't just the texts that some critics have found hard to take in
Mr. Del Tredici's recent work; rather, his overblown Romanticism,
lushness and large scale have drawn fire. "Often the music seemed to be
Nothing in Particular, Writ Large," Allan Kozinn of The New York Times
wrote of "Grand Trio," which Mr. Del Tredici composed for the
Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio in 2001.

Harold Meltzer, a composer and founder of the group Sequitur, which has
performed Mr. Del Tredici's music, said of it: "Whether you think it is
a good thing or not a good thing, it's obviously indulgent music."

Certainly Mr. Del Tredici has had no more luck securing a complete
performance of "Dum Dee Tweedle," an exhilarating and wonderfully
unconventional opera based on more "Alice" texts, than he has with his
"Favorite Penis Poems."

The problem is partly that classical music presenters want to retain the
favor of their audience. Therefore, new commissions these days tend to
be short; Mr. Del Tredici writes long.

New commissions also tend to be uncontroversial, in keeping with
society's unspoken mandate that classical music be uplifting, tame and
suitable as background at dinner parties. Classical audiences aren't
used to being confronted by art the way that gallerygoers, theater fans
or readers of fiction are. The director of the Great Lakes Chamber
Festival, James Tocco, is also openly gay but told The Detroit Free
Press, "I am conscious
about what is appropriate for audiences."

This attitude is far from the kind of thinking that brought to the
public "Seedbed," Vito Acconci's 1972 art installation that involved his
masturbating all day under a platform on the floor of a gallery. Mr. Del
Tredici's music is tame by comparison. It is also enjoyable.

"One gets tired of hearing song cycles about moonlight," Mr. Meltzer
said. "It's kind of refreshing that David is actually tackling a topic
that has relevance. It's nice to have songs about something people
actually think about. People regard it as pornographic because they are
not used to hearing about sex in a concert hall."