Military-musical complex
The musicians of ICE have a timely view of war.
Time Out Chicago / Issue 93: Dec 7–13, 2006
By Marc Geelhoed
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The GIs in Smoking aren’t real soldiers, just average citizens who reenact the Vietnam War on the weekends. Using photos like this from An-My Lê’s “Small Wars” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography as her starting point, International Contemporary Ensemble leader Claire Chase programmed two Vietnam War–themed works for ICE’s concert in that space. Lê’s photographs of Vietnam War reenactors force viewers to examine their preconceived notions about warfare and, as this e-mail exchange with Chase showed, so does ICE’s concert.
Is this an antiwar concert?
This is a concert about war, a sonic and visual exploration of various aspects of war—the horrific, the farcical, the historical, the imaginary, the emotional, the psychological and yes, the political. However, I think it would be overly simplistic to characterize this as merely an “antiwar concert,” just as I think it would be reductive to characterize An-My Lê’s photographs as simply “antiwar images.” They are images that probe deeply into a very specific, emotionally charged landscape of our living history: military-training grounds, both the “real” and the “imaginary.” Similarly, [George] Crumb’s and [Luigi] Nono’s compositions delve deeply into specific and very personal moments of the more distant (but no less present) history of the 1960s. In all three cases the artist’s act is not so much the making of a blanket political statement as it is an act of unveiling the terrors, fictions, contradictions and commodifications of war as we know it.
Obviously, we have made a curatorial decision in pairing two Vietnam-era works of music that speak loudly, albeit in different ways, against the political and humanitarian atrocities of their time, with an exhibition that explores similar issues in a contemporary context—the current, senseless war in Iraq. What we hope is that the photos will have timely resonance with the music, and that the music will imbue the photos with a certain historical resonance in return. We’ll leave the rest up to our audience members.
What does Nono’s piece say about war?
Nono dedicated the piece to the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam. The texts on which the work is based include excerpts from the appeal of the American Committee to Stop the War in Vietnam, the Second Havana Declaration, a quote from Fidel Castro, the reflection of a Detroit worker on a union battle, the final farewell between a man and a woman who are separated forever because of class divisions, and other “found” texts that originate from concrete, real-life situations and deal with the central theme of struggle. Struggle for liberation, class struggle, struggle against imperialism, revolutionary struggle. Nono didn’t want the essential theme of the work to be contained to any time period, language, or particular political agenda, and so we hear Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese, English and French, and we hear the voices of protest of young members of the Vietcong as well as young coal miners and union workers in the U.S. The title is taken from an Angolan guerrilla fighter: “They can’t burn down the forest because it is young and full of life,” and the forest serves throughout the piece as our symbol of the struggle for liberation.
Nono and his collaborator Giovanni Pirelli collected hundreds of pages of documents of speeches, depositions at trials, testimonies, diaries, letters, and interviews, before selecting the 11 fragments that make up the live portion of [Nono’s] A floresta é jovem cheja de vida. Each one, as Pirelli describes it, embodies “a demand for revolution,” both in the context of Third World revolutionary struggles and of workers’ struggles in developed capitalist countries.
Still, the power of the work in my mind lies in its ability to transport the listener into a dizzyingly complex, dense, and frighteningly intense emotional world for 45 minutes. Like Lê’s photographs, A floresta is in the end ambiguous, not dogmatic. It answers no questions, provides no “message,” but leaves us moved and very curious, with imprints of sonic images in our minds. The scoring seamlessly combines ten-channel electronic sounds, abstractions of the texts carried out by three live reciters and a soprano, along with a quasi-improvisatory live clarinet and five live percussionists playing massive copper sheets with hammers and other metals.
When we decided to program the Nono, we were intrigued by Lê’s ideas about the “theater of war,” and her fascination with America’s reenactment culture, because in a sense, what we do as performers is the exact same thing—we reenact fictions, moments and snapshots in history, hoping to give them new meaning.
How was Crumb relating to the Vietnam War? He wasn’t there, and said the work was an unconscious reference to the war. Lê also reflects on the nature of war by photographing the war reenactors. Is there a parallel there?
Crumb, by contrast, is not at all an activist, and conceived of this piece as a very personal response to a troubled time. When we worked on [Crumb’s] Black Angels with him for the first time many years ago, we expected to hear stories about his experience as a witness of that turbulent year, the year 1970. Instead, I remember him saying something like, “People tell me all kinds of things that they hear in the piece, and it’s always news to me.” Crumb is a gentle, soft-spoken, beautifully unassuming man, and he was very open with us, and very interested in how his music affected our audience, but he made it very clear that he didn’t have an agenda of any kind when he wrote this piece. Crumb has described the piece as a “voyage of the soul,” with three stages—Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation) and Return (redemption). The struggle is the oldest one in the books: good versus evil, God versus the devil, with the violin personifying the devil and the cello embodying the divine.
I think there is definitely a parallel between Lê’s photographic process and the compositional one, both in Crumb and Nono’s cases. They each take a picture, so to speak—in Lê’s case, it’s a picture of a solider playing “make-believe” in utter seriousness; in Nono’s case, it’s a series of sonic pictures, if you will, of 11 different moments in oral history, each of which embodies the central theme of struggle; and in Crumb’s case, it’s a picture of a fallen angel, representing the age-old polarity of good versus evil. They each make a moving image still, albeit in strikingly different ways. And they each expose that image, lay it out on the proverbial table, without comment, for their audience. The result is that many, many questions are posed, and very few are answered. It is here, in this space, that we are engaged as viewers and as listeners. Just like a photograph sticks with you much more potently than a series of moving images on the TV screen, a powerful piece of music makes a lasting imprint on our minds and souls in a way that a historical description cannot. We were also very intrigued by An-My Lê’s curators’ descriptions of the current war in Iraq as the “unseen” war, in contrast to the Vietnam War, which by all accounts was the first televised war. Lê grappled with this after having been denied access to the “real” war in Iraq by photographing the rehearsal process, so to speak, of soldiers. Similarly, Crumb and Nono don’t “depict” war. There is nothing to “see” in these works in terms of a war narrative or a combat scene or a dead body lying in the mud. There are merely emotional snapshots in which to lose yourself momentarily, characters to climb inside for a few minutes, so that you come back to your own “reality” afterward seeing things slightly differently.
How do these composers relate to war compared to previous centuries? These works are very different from Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory and Haydn’s Mass in a Time of War, even Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, right?
Every composer’s relationship to his or her political climate is unique, and has just as much to do with the composer’s aesthetic as it does with the era in which the composer is living; I think it’s problematic to try to discuss based solely on the historical period. Even in the case of Nono and Crumb, whose pieces were written not just in the same century but within just a few years of one another, we see that their approaches to composition, and their ideas about their respective “place” in the world of politics could not be more contrasting. Nono was a radical, outspoken activist; Crumb is a quiet poet. Nono viewed his role in the 1960s as an artist as absolutely political; Crumb viewed his role as an artist in the 1960s as much more inward and personal. The Haydn and Beethoven are utterly different, as are Stravinsky and Penderecki and any other composer who has written “in tempore belli” over the last several hundred years.
I think it’s important, though, to look at both the Crumb and the Nono as historical relics, too, the same way we look at Beethoven and Mozart. This is “classical” music—1969 was a long time ago!
With this project, we are taking two “period” pieces—two works that, in many ways, are anything but contemporary—and placing them alongside visual art that is in every way contemporary.
Is it the listener who has to conjure up the war in these pieces? Obviously, Nono’s uses a text, which helps, but what about Crumb? How much of the work to make these pieces relevant to war is done by the listener?
Because of the nature of the texts used in A floresta, I think it would be impossible to listen to this piece and not experience it as a piece of political theater of some kind, even if you were sheltered from all historical information about the work. I mean, we hear Nelson Mandela, we hear Fidel Castro, we hear a Vietcong fighter, and we see five percussionists playing not tam-tams and timpani but large, looming copper sheets with violent-looking instruments of metal. If this doesn’t all scream war, I’m not sure what it screams. By contrast, I first heard Black Angels when I was 12, when the Kronos Quartet’s CD came out on the Nonesuch label in 1990. I had no idea what the piece was about, and had I been told or had I bothered to read the liner notes, I’m not sure how much I would have understood anyway. But the piece moved me to tears and that disc was one of my prized possessions all through my adolescence. It wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I learned what the piece was about, and unfortunately I can’t tell you that it meant more to me then because of that knowledge.
If we knew nothing about An-My Lê’s subjects for the “Small Wars” exhibit, we’d probably think they were “real” soldiers, too, just like the ones in [the] “29 Palms” [exhibit, also at the MOCP]. Would the exhibit be less powerful? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it would just be powerful in different ways. I mean, do you need to know that Picasso’s Guernica is about war to get something out of looking at it? I don’t think so. I’d like to think that a great piece of art will move us no matter how little we “know” about it. But golly, program notes and translations are nice, and having more information never hurts us, even if it doesn’t help us.
Why do you think Nono and Crumb were drawn to comment on the nature of war?
I’m not a composer, and I’m definitely not George or Luigi, so I really can’t presume to know. But as artists, we have turned to human suffering for subject material since day one, in an attempt to understand, to document and in many cases to question the inescapable suffering that defines us as human beings. “The camera is the eye of history,” said the famous Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. If this is the case, maybe music is the soul of history.
Do you worry that art is ineffective as a means of protesting war? I mean, the guns won’t stop just because a composer has scribbled some notes on a piece of paper.
When art starts answering questions or promoting agendas, it loses my attention. No, I don’t worry that art is ineffective as a means of protesting war, because I don’t think any of us is naive enough to think that by performing or composing a piece of music in a time of war, we are instantly effecting social change. The best we can hope to accomplish is to raise questions, and to help people experience on a profound, human level moments, stories, histories, and all of their abstract and contradicting emotions, in ways that newspapers and “historical” accounts of war cannot capture. I think it’s fascinating that even the Nono, which is by far the most politically outspoken and “in-your-face” of the works that are we presenting in this program, ends with a question, not a declaration. It is an excerpt from an anonymous Berkeley student protester, who asks plainly, “Is this all we can do?” It is at once a call to action and a revelation of desperation; it is at once pessimistic and deeply hopeful. But it is a question.
Maybe it is all we can do, but we should still do it.
ICE’s war-inspired concert is Wednesday 13, and admission is free.
