Thursday, October 4, 2007

IDEAS Boston -- Michael Gandolfi

Michael Gandolfi is a composer whose music has been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, The Houston Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, among others. He is also a Music professor who serves on the faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center and is Chairman of the Composition Department at The New England Conservatory of Music.

Gandolfi is here to teach. He tells us that he was taken with Nader Tehrani's comment that an architectural structure grows from its materials, so he wants to talk about composition. He proceeds to intone some nonsense syllables and clap, then he does so again. Which composition was more dense? The second one, most people agree. Not so! The patterns of the two pieces were equally dense, Gandolfi says -- a series of longs and shorts, both times. But his clapping (the "grid behind the rhythmical pattern") was faster the second time, so we perceived the second composition as more dense. He has the audience chant and clap along a few times; we've just had a simple taste of a "pure musical experience."

Gandolfi then deconstructs a Mozart sonata, and shows how the meaning and syntax of a piece of music changes when you shift the "access points" and "stress points." When you listen to music, there is a "grid" upon which a pattern is placed. The meaning of music begins to "flip-flop" when you play with the backdrop grid.

"The Garden of Cosmic Speculation," Gandolfi tells us, is a composition he wrote in 2004 for a Tanglewood festival -- it was inspired by a far-out, 30-acre private garden in the Borders area of Scotland created by postmodernist architect and architectural critic Charles Jencks. He describes the result as a "completely impractical orchestral work." He's still writing it; it's up to 11 movements now. He shows a slide of the garden and plays a minute-long excerpt of his composition.

Gandolfi plays more excerpts, including one inspired by Fractal Terrace, a feature of Jencks's Garden. How to describe? Dramatic without any climax, quirky and fraught: a soundtrack for "Alice in Wonderland," as directed by David Lynch. Another excerpt he plays: "The Jumping Bridge," which will be performed next Thursday through Saturday by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

And that's it!

Ashbrook: "Just when you need a Garden of Cosmic Speculation, one shows up!"

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:55 PM

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