Musicians Take a Stroll Along a
Pioneer's Path
Paul Griffiths in THE NEW YORK TIMES
5/31/2000
Excerpt: "Marc Peloquin honored both by playing a group of piano pieces
from memory, with great poetry and accomplishment. "
The complete review:
By all accounts -- including the account given by his music -- Otto
Luening was a sweet soul who composed, played the flute and
taught his students all through a very long life. Had he lived just four
more years, he would have been at last Wednesday evening's
centennial concert, given appropriately at Miller Theater on the
campus at Columbia, the university he served with great distinction
and affection for several decades.
Luening is probably best remembered for his pioneering
achievements in electronic music, and he was proud of those. He
could take the trouble, in his 90's, to write to a critic to clarify what
happened when he and his colleague, Vladimir Ussachevsky,
presented the world's first concert of electronic music, at Columbia
in 1952.
But there was more to him than the sounds and forms, still surprising
and appealing, that he discovered during the early years of the tape
recorder, and it was on his instrumental pieces and songs that the
centennial celebration concentrated.
The program showed that a lot in Luening's career can be explained
with reference to his teacher, Busoni: the willingness to explore
electronic music and, what might seem contradictory, the continuing
attachment to older styles, including those especially of Bach and
Mozart. Busoni-like, too, was Luening's unpretentious fecundity,
and perhaps even his touches of Americana could be ascribed to
Busoni, as well as to Copland.
A typical Luening movement will start with some small musical point
and fluently extend from it under the shadow of the masters, often
with a dance rhythm gently in the background, though also, less
conventionally, with a mysteriously wobbly sense of harmony. In a
musical world where the old major and minor keys were losing their
grip, Luening found ways to go on taking random walks, serene and
sunlit, never minding that his chord progressions would have to slip
in almost every measure.
Some fine musicians were at Miller to go on these walks with their
composer and their audience. Marc Peloquin honored both by
playing a group of piano pieces from memory, with great poetry and
accomplishment. Michael Finckel and Christopher Oldfather
performed some pieces for cello and piano, including the weird
"Aria," which recalls virtually every operatic aria from Mozart to
Puccini without quite quoting any.
Judith Bettina, singing delightfully and also by heart, with James
Goldsworthy at the piano, presented a sequence of songs showing
little change in harmony or hymnlike style across all the years from
1917 to 1993. Margaret Lancaster, on the composer's own
instrument, gave the first performances of "Three Nocturnes" with
electronic echoes, notated by Dan Cooper from tapes made by
Luening, and of Cooper's own Suite.
© The New York Times