Leo Brouwer, Lennon McCartney, Morton Feldman, and Stefan Wolpe

—->The Village Trip’s Wolpe-Albers-Brouwer-Feldman Weekend<—-
With Thomas Flippin, David Glaser, Ben Verdery, Kentner Anderson, Robert Morris and much more.

The performance will feature Leo Brouwer’s Cuban Landscape With Rain, wherein Brouwer shows himself to be a good Wolpe student even when he is channeling the minimalists.

Paul McCartney did a Wolpe trick and some years later, Brouwer did the same trick inside-out, in Cuban Landscape With Rain. Both are examples of *broken symmetris*, a trick which Morton Felman applied in a most systematic way in his music.

How to frame this *Wolpe trick*? I do not mean to suggest that Wolpe invented the trick. But it’s something that Feldman learned from Wolpe that is so fundamental to Feldman’s work that the trick begins to mark Wolpe and some of his students, especially Browuer and Feldman. Once one become aware of “Wolpeisms” in Brouwer, one tends to find more and more of them.

Here’s the Beatles song:

Paul breaks the octotonic, which in this song projects “earnest hippie”, and nevertheless, with the addition of the low E, the chord suddenly becomes whole-tone heavy, washing away the minor third-heavy Tristan chord, bringing an abrupt change of mood. It turns on a dime into skiffle. I’m looking for precedents for this move. I’d expect to find it in Debussy or Faure. I could use your help.

In my setting of the Quebecois folksong, *Ziguezon*, I try the M5, mod12 of the Beatles trick and it works – the addition of the 5th note still breaks the octotonic.

Here’s what Brouwer did in Cuban Landscape With Rain:

Brouwer breaks the whole tone symmetry–

Adding the low E to the whole tone collection, G, A, B, C# abruptly introduces 4/5ths of the octotonic scale.
The composition goes octotonic in the next section as well. The low E is a most sly hint of what’s to come.
*Curious that there are Es and Ds in the other guitars that do not take the punch away from the low E.* They dither and hint, perhaps.

The early 21st C. is a mad rush toward rendering pitch no more powerful than noise, and these are simple examples of what is lost as pitch becomes just anoher noise. We are in an era of collective amnesia.

Nothing against noise intended here. Noise, and the Paul McCartney trick…..; microtones AND all the rest; JI AND all the unquantifiable, boundless musical possibilites we’ve discovered over the centureis.

It is wonderful that Cuban Lanscape With Rain preserves Wolpeisms with utmost simplicity, more simple than Feldman. It’s as if Brouwer is saying,

“Music can be simple, the minimalists were onto something; and the pitch things that Paul McCartney figured out do not have to be discarded; no throwing away the baby with the bathwater….”

Please join us september 12, 13, 14!

Ask Bill or any of the guitarists for a complimentary ticket.

Angel Blanco will play this Feldman piece: