Lee Hyla: My Life on the Plains on Tzadik
One should know about all the structures of fantasy and the fantasies of structures, and mix surprise and enigma, magic and shock, intelligence and abandon, form and antiform.
Thus spake Stefan Wolpe in a masterful, Dada-inflected 1959 lecture entitled “Thinking Twice.” Lee Hyla would have been seven when it was delivered: probably a tad too young to appreciate its gnomic wisdom. Nor, for that matter, did Hyla get the chance to study with Wolpe, who died in 1972 having never fully received his due. Yet of all the composers to have come along on the American scene in Wolpe’s wake, Hyla has arguably done the most to carry the Wolpean torch, to further the German émigré’s project of marrying openminded eclecticism with total artistic integrity, of fusing the untrammeled freedom of improvisation with the resilient objectivity of aesthetic reason. Hyla, who was formerly active as a free jazz pianist, made this debt plain early on by quoting Wolpe’s Chamber Piece No. 1 in his breakthrough work, 1984’s Pre-Pulse Suspended, and if his music has never drawn directly on Wolpe’s idiosyncratic twelve-tone technique (as is the case with, say, Charles Wuorinen), its spirit has always informed Hyla’s output. From their garrulous, aggressive gesturality to their interest in transmuting opposites into simultaneities (Trans: the title of one of Hyla’s chamber orchestra pieces) and their intuitive sense of le ton juste, the affinities between the two are many and striking. And while none of this is to say that Hyla isn’t very much his own man — the rockist edge and resolute avoidance of intellectual ostentation are among the music’s more endearing traits — the analogy with a Wolpe is particularly apt since Hyla tallies with no school, bows before no trends, and has no real followers. A true American original, he’s difficult to contextualize other than by reference to another one-of-a-kind figure: like Wolpe, Hyla treads a lonely path, always following the courage of his artistic convictions, even if it means some will mistakenly label him a “composer’s composer.”
Composer Lee Hyla (photo credit: Jane Lackey)
On August 5, ICE began their residency at New York’s annual Mostly Mozart Festival with an explosion of bold, colorful works. The excitement seemed apt as the Lincoln Center concert also marked the beginning of their tenth year as an ensemble. ICE’s program showcased a variety of adventurous contemporary music while imprinting their own take on the theme of this year’s festival: birds. Rather than adhering strictly to the subject, the ensemble interspersed pieces influenced by natural settings with pieces using birdsong, creating a context (à la 
As this season was drawing to an end, the Metropolitan Museum was announcing the next, a couple of weeks ago, in the beautiful Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Curated by Limor Tomer, this new season will feature some edgy shows, some new music performed on historical instruments from the Sau Wing Lam Collection, and a year-long partnership with Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky.
More than seventy years since its composition, Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” swells with relevancy in the modern era. Those of us alive today have a more fractured and complex sense of the passage of time than any previous generation of humanity, living simultaneously in lightspeed cyberspace and glacial reality, keeping in touch with friends, family and associates across all possible timezones and sleep schedules. Messiaen’s most famous piece is a kaleidoscope of time-perception and apocalyptic paranoia, chronicling his fear for humanity in the throes of World War II, and also his daily struggle to maintain sanity as a prisoner of war. But is a simple reading of the piece enough to capture the same spirit, decades after its birth? It’s doubtful that Messiaen would’ve wanted musicians to take a museum-mentality approach to his work. Enter clarinetist David Krakauer and his like-minded cohorts: cellist Matt Haimovitz, pianist Geoffrey Burleson, violinist Maria Bachmann, and DJ/MC Socalled. The evening was billed as “Akoka: The End of Time”, and featured three separate-but-connected works: “Akoka”, a structured improvisation organized by Krakauer, an unaltered presentation of Messiaen’s Quartet, and finally “Meanwhile” a composition by Socalled.
