Gloria Coates (b. 1938) Symphonies Nos. 1, 7 and 14 Gloria Coates: Cataclysmic Classicist Gloria Coates has cornered the market on a certain kind of...
Gloria Coates (b. 1938)
Symphonies Nos. 1, 7 and 14
Gloria Coates: Cataclysmic Classicist
Gloria Coates has cornered the market on a certain kind of
liminal perception in the realm of acoustic music. There is always something slowly
going on in her music, and it often turns out to be not what you think. Her paradigms
are few, but they are varied in ingenious ways. One of them, which can be heard
on this disc, is the homespun tune, or chorale, emerging from a wavery, indistinct
texture, like a castle emerging from mists blown away by the wind. Another is a
broad sonority slowly going out of tune, or else coming into tune. Coates's
reliance on simple processes involving motion makes her music somehow turbulent
and stable at once. Put any thirty seconds of this disc into a motion picture soundtrack,
and it would be associated with something cataclysmic - the overthrow of an
empire, massive destruction by alien hordes, a town destroyed by an erupting
volcano. And yet there's little personal emotion in Coates's music, it's just
huge, grand, beyond human scale, and immanently transformative.
For despite her brave new sound-world, Coates is something
of a classicist among modern composers. She loves symmetry, palindromes,
mirrors, and above all, canons. Looking at her scores, it is often possible to quickly
tell where a piece is going; given the first three pages of one of her
symphonies, one could often plausibly write the next seven. But the music never
sounds that predictable, because her sonic devices have a mysterious
muddying effect. Chief of these is the glissando. It has been a lifelong
preoccupation. As early as 1962, still a student, she baffled her teachers by writing
a string quartet entirely in glissandos. Since then she has written thousands
more: slow, long glissandos, that make you feel as if the earth is starting to
fall away from under you; little, wavy glissandos that make you think there's
something wrong with your ears, or your audio equipment; fast sweeping
glissandos that create a tumult of energy - but all of them worked out within some
clear structure and often gradual process.
And often that process is symphonic. Having now written
fourteen symphonies, Coates is the most prolific woman symphonist who ever
lived. (Second, if you are keeping track, was the obscure Julia Perry of Kentucky, 1924-1979, who wrote twelve.) Fourteen puts her way ahead of Beethoven, Bruckner,
Dvořak, and others, on a par with Roy Harris, and only one step away from Shostakovich.
By virtue of both quantity and immediately-recognizable personality, Coates
should be one of the best-known figures in contemporary music. As a very
American figure, however, living since 1969 as an expatriate in Germany (where composing women are particularly unencouraged), she is always the archetypal
outsider.
This new
Symphony No. 14 (2002) is an especial homage
to Gloria Coates's native land, based as it is on early American hymns by two
of New England's first composers, Supply Belcher (1752-1836, known in his lifetime
as "the Handel of Maine") and William Billings (1746-1800). Scored
for string orchestra and timpani, the work is typically outlandish, not only
its glissandos, but for its use of quartertones (Coates provides a subtitle: "Symphony
in Microtones"). Throughout, the strings are divided into two sections,
half tuned a quarter-tone lower than the other half. This is less evident in
the first movement, which begins with a bang but immediately turns soft,
gliding endlessly through a hilly landscape of carefully calibrated glissandos.
From these emerge Belcher's
Lamentation in quite audible half-notes
against Coates's default metre of 5/4. The lamentation fades back into the
glissandos, and the movement ends with ethereal yearning on a low C and a very
high B.
The second movement,
Jargon: Homage to William Billings, brings the quarter-tones to life. The fierce dissonance, punctuated by
pizzicatos, is appropriate to Coates's source material, which is itself the
earliest American instance of unrelieved dissonance: Billings's song
Jargon.
Early Boston critics had complained that Billings's music was too consonant,
and so the old tanner-turned-composer wrote a response in complete (though
diatonic) dissonances:
Let horrid jargon split the air,
And rive the nerves asunder;
Let hateful discord greet the ear
As terrible as thunder!
Coates quotes the hymn once through in its original form,
then illustrates the lyrics more vividly than Billings by playing it in
quarter-tone dissonances. Movement three,
The Lonesome Ones, reprises a melody
from Coates's
Symphony No. 5, a tritone line heard over and over in
parallel quarter-tones, giving way to a texture of increasingly wide glissandos
moving at different rates of speed in each string section.
For many years, Coates's
Symphony No. 1 (1972-3) remained
her best-known and most widely-played work. It was originally called "Music
on Open Strings" (as she had not decided to call her large works
symphonies until the first few were completed), and the instruments all play in
scordatura, that is with each section tuned to an unconventional set of
pitches. In the first movement, all strings are tuned to a Chinese scale (once
given to her by her teacher Alexander Tcherepnin) containing only B flat, C, D
flat, F, and G, which allows the orchestra to play (and gradually transform) an
original tune based on the scale. The melody can then be played on open strings,
but lest you fear that the string orchestra will have nothing to do with their
left hands, there are glissandos, wide vibratos, and taps on the body of the instrument
called for.
The second movement begins with these same pitches and moves
from rhythmic pizzicato motives toward upwards glissandos. During the course of
the third movement, however, the strings begin with their original pitches and
gradually retune them, while playing, to the conventional tuning. The finale,
titled
Refracted Mirror Canon for Fourteen Lines, starts with the conventional
tuning and begins a canonic process of upward and downward glissandos at
different tempos, leading at last to stasis and ending, like so many of Coates's
movements, at the point of maximum intensity.
Coates's
Seventh Symphony, from 1990-91, is one of
her most ambitious works, bringing her concepts to bear on a full orchestra
with brass and percussion. The first movement goes through a canonic process of
increasingly wide glissandos, punctuated by a simple bass drum motive which,
toward the end, recurs every five beats. The second, a little more conventional
by Coates's standards, derives most of its material from a chromatic melody
heard first in canon, building up textures that erupt in repetitive flurries of
32 notes (demi-semiquavers) in the various instruments, a grand noise indeed.
The final movement is an experience in converging glissandos, with the low
strings coming from their bottom note, the high strings gliding down from a
high register, and the percussion marking off time as the orchestra writhes and
thickens.
If the score is easily described, the sound is indescribable.
That's the paradox of Coates's music; she is so economic with her materials
that although her notation appears quite simple, the effect of the glissandos
and other devices in tempo canons creates sound masses in perpetual motion like
we've never heard before. It is far from being "horrid jargon", because
the processes are so transparent. But it is music that, in its intensity, could
"rive the nerves asunder". Old Billings would be astonished at what
he started.
Kyle Gann