kagablog

There is a Buddhist ideal of writing all the worlds stories on a bean.

The piano is such a bean- what Michael Blake has written on it are not just his stories but a considerable number of its own.

The piano lives between a scientific and an economic boundary It has the same uniformity, comprehensiveness and principled purity that made the nineteenth century able to populate the periodic table. The piano is a conveyance, exactly like photography; both advanced by increased accuracy, range, sensitivity and fidelity until the burgeoning figures of the symphony orchestra appeared in the one and the spectacle of the metropolis in the other.

The nineteenth century sustained writing as an industry Friedrich Kittler has framed its ideal as an Aufschreibesysteme. The piano was the hardware to musics torrent of printed software that rivaled Goethe Hegel, Balzac, Marx, Ruskin, Tolstoy and Darwin in prolixity

Three events mark the pianos contemporeniety–or separate us from its being in the nineteenth century

Arnold Schonberg interrupted its communion with the symphony orchestra by writing piano pieces where pitch is shrunk to a partitioning device. This lets asymmetries of tessitura, attack, phrase and rhythm assume its role. The pianos encompassing neutrality becomes a violent laboratory of the exception. Schonberg painstakingly mapped these singular constructions onto ensembles of no fixed genre. In Pierrot Lunaire it is the piano which is being dramatically, unsuccessfully transcribed by the voice and instruments: saturating them with its anomalies.

Claude Debussy exceeded the piano in the opposite direction ,drawing refractions of the Parsifal orchestra back into it to the brink of ambiguity. The greatest transcriber of Wagner after Liszt he was the first to exceed the limit of the pianos resolution, forcing him to rethink it into an original instrument, an iconic sign in the place of an indexical one.

Being in Morges and remembering rather then identifying is a heroic task: in Remembering Stravinsky we meet Michael Blake’s imagination under torture. If memory is the root of abstraction we find many of Michaels concepts- his furniture for hosting other composers- openly arrayed in these four minutes: like a glimpse into the living room of a bombed out building.

Applying Stravinsky’s mastery of caricature to himself , we meet , along a clear horizon, the seeds of the tiniest Stravinskian world : the tick-tock answer of chord to chord, the instant neutralization of motifs to block phrases forming, the shuttling of material across registers. Yet the plane of this horizon is not Stravinskian – it is Ivesian -and we sense there the tempo of the monument and silent factual inscriptions of the first of the Three Places in New England – one of the earliest compositions to direct utterances into the past tense.

This séance between Michael and the two dead masters is also a public piano story , the third at the base of modernity: Stravinsky’s neutralization.

Few other composers so grasped the tectonic value of the piano , its ability to project structure in place of form. Those pianists who play versions of le Sacre evocatively learn this to their cost. Stravinsky’s coloured pencils, his flirtation with the pianola and his lifelong taste for muted uprights are ancillaries to this massive reduction of the piano from image or voice to diagram: to an empty sign capable of arbitrarily matching any dimension of sonic design.

The longest piece in the collection- Ways to Put in the Salt – has Michaels Ouija bottle pointing to Debussy. The black people of Southern Africa are spectacular pioneers. Jared Diamond famously used their crossing from present day Cameroon to the unknown south through several biomes, social pressures and worlds inhospitable to domestication to prove that ingenuity and resilience rather than empire and wealth are the rewards associated with north south rather than east west migrations. Part of this African self-reliance is an intensely economical culture- where single idioms encode books of statutes, The great Xhosa woman musicians speak of putting the salt into their songs and Michael, familiar with this tradition unpacks this as well as he can into ‘cross rhythms, clap delay techniques, altered scale tones, parallel harmonic and melodic parts , non harmonic tones, dissonance, pattern singing and varied vocal techniques’.

His list becomes a challenge to musical synonymy- functioning like similar instructions in Jasper Johns diaries or Fluxus recipes to block the piano from functioning as a realist instrument, a snapshot – and pushing closer to a properly iconic function.

This is the Debussy edge of the triangle formed in the refolding of the nineteenth century piano-mirror. Michaels reading of Xhosa idiom is inevitably channeled through the author of Voiles – not in style but in logic- exemplifying the ways to put in the salt but never stooping to illustrate them

Their Souls Go Marching On is a fortuitous coda to a collection spelled in the three afterlives of the piano: Schonberg -130 years after his birth and in the company of his co founder of the modern canon ,Charles Ives -finds Michael Blake at his most autobiographical.

Caught between two masters he attempts their manic elision, jolting each one a click forward along their patrimony- Ives in the tempo of Nancarrow and Schonberg in the counterpoint of the Lyric Suite. But two minutes and fourteen seconds are too long to run ahead of the gods and this extraordinary cut-up falters at one minute forty seconds to reveal its most Schonbergian moment of all – a motor coughing into a stall and its most Ivesian- two imbricated styles falling away from each other. This is the essential piano tale – the instrument of balanced neutrality made to ricochet between every kind of asymmetry: the piano as a dictionary to which double grammar is applied to fend off realism.

Once established the Schonberg Debussy Stravinsky triangle is probed in different directions. Three Toys is a commission designed to engage Satie . the spinning top – a presumed source of the famous pear- is pointlessly viewed from different angles- a feint that would have amused Eric. Michael Blake shifts the engagement to a musical equivalent of Duchamp’s rotoreliefs- gramophone driven optical effects from the time when the great Dadaist styled himself as a salesman of visual gadgets. Jill Richards renders these anti-variations – studies in indiscernible difference- with exact irony. These three pieces are the zero on the number line of Michael Blake’s inventory.

French Suite pursues Satie into the domain of Ravel , affectionately teasing the exponents of African Pianism – a debate with which Michael Blake’s name is often associated – with a short cut between Couperin , cinematic motion and dance made in their name. In a similar gesture 38 a Hill Street Blues mosaics the near Webernian Uhadi bow music with Meade Lux Lewis’ Honky Tonk Train Blues- itself a Stravinskian exercise in intervallic economy and gestural counterpoint.

Such pieces highlight the condensation and polyvalence of African music and the inanity of treating its powerful architectures as colour, ornament or citation.

Nightsongs – a construction from eponymous Cole Porter numbers plus the apt ‘ I concentrate on you ‘ recreates in the friction of a single composers work with itself avenues into Scriabin and Ives of the Concord Sonata- an echo in Porterese of Holloway’s Gilded Goldbergs or Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues

Expanding this drift are BWV Fragments, a Kagelian misprision of Bach cello suites and Oh Claire ,an acronym on Myra Hess’ blueprint of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring – soaked in figuration and whipped along by Percy Grainger.

Bach is perhaps to Michael Blake the utopia of the keyboard , a moment when it could balance a dialogue between two eras, one filled with myth, the other with science , an ideal transparency and pure function before pianos began to illustrate orchestras and then flew apart into three exclusive domains modeled on the sign.

Jill Richards, the David Tudor of South African music, rises to the rhetorical challenge of these works which are Ivesian surveyors pegs around the three territories of the piano She buys into their multiple footings like a stand up comedian working the United Nations General Assembly. Her hypnotic Satie, her hysteric Ravel, her Debussian mimes, her Stravinakian greyness and her endlessly unbalanced Schonberg give her the perfect masks to unfold Michael Blake’s edenic worlds into a one -woman revue.

Rudiger Meyer once remarked that Kevin Volans was South Africa’s Jackson Pollock – if such parallels have any meaning, then Michael Blake -cool wrangler of the disparate – is it’s Jasper Johns.