A cluster of discordant strings crescendos, while an out-of-tune piano plays a ghostly reference to "Rock of Ages." A rush of percussive effects, a blast of swooping horns is shrouded in a mist of high, random string harmonics. Is this the last example of post-Modernism in music, a pointless exercise in color-for-its-own-sake? To the contrary, this is John Corigliano's "Three Hallucinations for Orchestra," a singularly nonhallucinatory work, and one typical of the composer's output in that he uses contemporary techniques to achieve the traditional ends of linear structure: conflict, climax, and resolution.
An ethics professor lectures on morality, his lecture interrupted by acrobats, by a singer who can't remember her song, by a telecast of astronauts feuding on the moon, by rape, and, finally, by murder. Another performance statement, perhaps? One intended to subvert meaning, mock middle-class values and, indeed, frustrate any values at all? No. This is Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, a play utilizing every Modern and post-Modern device suitable to making a cogent case for the necessity of moral absolutes.
Stoppard in the theater and Corigliano in the concert hall are prime examples of a rare sort of artist: the traditionalist in modern clothing, or, if you will, the Western artist functioning in what seems to be a post-Western world. They are vintage wine in new bottles, and even a brief look at their works suggests a rethinking of what it means for a work to be modern.
Both Stoppard (an Englishman) and Corigliano (an American) command sizable arsenals of contemporary techniques. A casual listener might be tempted to lump Corigliano in with other musical moderns for his highly dissonant harmonic language, use of aleatory techniques, hyper-virtuosic instrumental writing, and rhythmic complexity. In fact, these are hallmarks shared by very different kinds of musicians: One or more of the above could apply to Elliott Carter, John Cage, Milton Babbitt, or Luciano Berio. If a person were to listen to the Corigliano Clarinet Concerto (available, by the way, on New World Records) after hearing Carter's Symphony for Three Orchestras, or Berio's Voci, or Cage's anything, a certain striking difference would be clear. It would not be easy to put into words, but all but the dullest listener would notice that the Carter piece (or the Cage or the Berio) was doing one sort of thing, while the Corigliano was dong quite another, and that the Corigliano was much closer to - perhaps congruent with - the sort of thing produced by composers of earlier eras - like Sibelius, Strauss, Schubert, or the nondodecaphonic Stravinsky.
Similarly, more than one playgoer has walked out of a Stoppard play feeling that he didn't "get it," or that maybe what he had witnessed was some sort of absurdist experiment. Yet, an evening of Stoppard's Travesties or Jumpers following an evening of, say, Samuel Beckett would seem almost nostalgic. True, formal complexities, involved theatricalisms, and self-references abound in a typical Stoppard play, and these are to be found in Beckett and company as well. But whereas in the Beckett they are likely to exist in and for their own sake, pointing down a road that is not, infact, a road but rather a dead end of despair, they are in Stoppard more likely to point down a road that leads out of the present despair and toward a lost thing called metaphysics.
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