Composer Elinor Armer brims with excitement about creating music. "There's a kind of energy that I feel when I'm playing music or writing it. I feel exhilarated and happy and 'God, is this fun.'" Armer, who retired from teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music a few years ago, is co-honoree in a special concert by the Conservatory Orchestra this week. The concert features the premiere of her Piano Concerto, as well as another recent work, The Call of the West.
Armer's broadmindedness and joi de vivre show through in the influences that make up her style — everything from the standard repertory that she plays on piano to the polytonal chords pioneered by Darius Milhaud, one of her teachers, to jazz, to (occasionally) Spike Jones. "I just sort of graze among the 'isms,'" she says of her compositional persona. It's this breadth of material that led her to title the concerto's first movement "Every Prospect," after an often quoted phrase from a poem by Bishop Reginald Heber ("Missionary Hymn," ca. 1825: "What tho' the spicy breezes/Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle;/Though every prospect pleases,/And only man is vile").
You might expect open ears from a student of the ever-inquisitive Milhaud. Also, her father invented stereophonic speakers. But the artistic freedom to roam can be hard-won. Armer credits her work with writer Ursula K. Le Guin on Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts(1985-1995), a set of pieces built around the idea of a world that uses music for more purposes than the ones we're familiar with.
Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts has the virtue of displaying an extraordinary variety of material and technique. Describing an island where the walls of buildings are constructed of music, Armer chopped up phrases of the Lutheran chorale A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Another, perhaps the best, of the pieces is Anithaca, written for the San Francisco Girls' Chorus, a piece about girls weaving music and words together — and then inweaving them apart.
That was a breakthrough because I was working with one of the great writers. It was where I learned to trust the material. We just played together and yakked and fell off our chairs laughing … nothing was too outrageous. We intended it to be a radio program. We wanted people to see it, hear it themselves, and come up with their own similes and metaphors.
Listening to Your Own Creation
From these examples, it's probably clear what Armer means when she speaks of music as "serious play." She conceives her music with an underlying story or image, and loves Haydnesque wit and surprises. But Uses of Music, in its sprawling, imaginative unruliness, also demonstrates the value of a piece of advice she liked to give her students: "When the piece starts talking back, you just listen to it and it'll tell you which way it wants to go." In other words, follow your material, not your preconceived plan for it. The long gestation of her Piano Concerto is partly explained by Armer's inability to take her own advice, and partly by the weight of the classical tradition. "I was haunted — I should say, daunted — by all of the concertos I was familiar with." Like Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto, Armer's work begins with a blazing, and structurally important, cadenza. At first, she tried to connect the cadenza to a soaring theme she had (literally) dreamt up.I tried to work with that theme for at least two years, and could not make it attach to the opening cadenza. It was like an organ transplant — it kept being rejected. So I finally said to myself, "You've got to throw that stuff out." So I took about two years of sketches and attempted beginnings and tossed them out. And then I went back in there [to the cadenza] and really assayed everything in there, and came up with such a wealth of thematic material that it was like breaking up a logjam.Following traditional concerto format, Armer planned the second movement as a slow, elegiac piece in the manner of the slow movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488. And then the disaster of 9/11 occurred. "I happened to be separated from my family at that time. ... And so I did the only thing I felt I could do. I went to the piano." The concerto movement came directly from that material and, of course, is much more tragic and grieving than Armer had planned. The third movement, in another nod to tradition, is a Rondo, sprinkled with the composer's idiosyncratic use of jazz, and bringing back the cadenza as a gesture of completion. Having been to the archipelago of Uttermost Parts, broken the logjam of the concerto, and gained a lot of life experience, Armer has earned the confidence she now displays.
I feel like I have just now arrived at a sense of how I like to compose and what I like to do in composition. And I don't feel apologetic for any of it, and I have lost my anxiety about whether it's appropriate, or fashionable, or whatever. My self-consciousness has dissipated as my self-awareness has taken its place. From here on out I want to write more pieces for larger forces, because I feel like I can handle them. So maybe we can say that [at 68 years old] I've just finished my early period.