“I’ll Work from Anything”: A Conversation with Jonathan Golove
BY PETER J. RABINOWITZ
Jonathan Golove is not your average cellist. His classical repertoire ranges from early music to the avant-garde, from the familiar to the arcane. He also plays with a variety of jazz artists—and speaking of arcana, he’s been instrumental in resurrecting the theremin cello, an obscure instrument that had the briefest of lives well over half a century ago. “It’s an instrument that Léon Theremin made in the 20s and 30s,” he says. “It’s based on the same circuitry as his better-known, space-controlled instrument that you play by waving your hands in front of a console with two antennae. This instrument is sort of the equivalent of a one-string cello, although in fact it has no string at all. It has a lever which is the equivalent of a bow, a volume lever that’s played with the right hand; the left hand glides along a long plastic strip which is the equivalent of a string.
“It has a large range and the only known composition for this instrument is a fabulous masterpiece by Edgard Varèse, his
Ecuatorial
—it actually calls for two of these instruments along with a bass voice and a large ensemble with brass, percussion, and keyboards. It was played one time in Town Hall, in the mid 30s. It was a disaster and Varèse shelved the piece. When he came back to it a number of years later, Theremin had disappeared. In fact he had been taken back to the Soviet Union by his employers in the KGB.” Subsequent performances substituted the
ondes martenot.
Many years later, Golove was contacted “out of the blue” by Olivia Mattis, a musicologist and scholar of Varèse and Theremin, part of a “coalition of people that had successfully re-created the theremin cello,” he recalls. “I had been playing electric cello, largely for improvised music, for about 10 years. She had noticed that
Ecuatorial
has been programmed at the University of Buffalo to be performed by the Slee Sinfonietta.” She asked if he’d like to consult with the maker of the instruments, Floyd Engel, who lives outside Buffalo. “He’s not a musician, so he needed somebody to advise him on how to improve these instruments. I’m an adventurous spirit, so I went out there. I tried the thing and I was amazed. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. But it did need refinement. In fact Floyd and I are still collaborating fairly actively on improvements to the instrument.”
How did this obscure instrument get re-created? “There were two known examples of the original in the entire world, both of them in out-of-the-way places and neither of them functioning. Floyd and his son managed to get their hands first on one, to take it apart and measure everything, and to copy it in the most exact and specific way possible, using among other things antique tubes. After we performed
Ecuatorial
for the first time in 2002 in Buffalo, they journeyed to the other one, which is in Vermillion, South Dakota, in a museum called the Shrine to Music. Once again they got permission to take the thing apart and they discovered some differences. In fact, since the instrument was never mass-produced, all the examples that were ever made were prototypes. So they saw what was different about this one and they changed something a little bit. It worked even better. And since then we’ve made some other improvements as well.”
Each time they’ve played
Ecuatorial
, Golove has had a partner so both parts could be played. So Floyd actually made two of these? “He made 10 of them, and now has made several more. As far as I can tell, I and the two partners I’ve had are the only people to have performed publically on these instruments. They were largely sold off to collectors and non-performer types. Nobody has seemed to find anything to do with them, as far as I can tell. But I’m now taking this instrument further and I’ve now performed other repertoire on it. So far I’ve been sticking with the repertoire that Clara Rockmore made famous for the theremin, because I figured that if she could play it on that kind of an instrument, then I could probably do it on the theremin cello as well. That logic has carried me thus far, but I intend to branch out and both to commission new pieces and to write them myself.”
Golove, it turns out, is not the first person to apply the theremin cello to more standard repertoire. “Stokowski commissioned Theremin to make one for the Philadelphia Orchestra,” he says. “He kept it tucked between the cellos and basses out of sight and it was largely used, at least anecdotally, to reinforce the bass lines in those gargantuan transcriptions he liked to do, like the Bach Toccata and Fugue. He wanted more bass, and the cello theremin that he asked for from Theremin could be a powerful bass instrument. Varèse, on the other hand, wanted a piercing treble instrument. In fact, the part that I play in
Ecuatorial
, which I’ve now done in Amsterdam, London, Paris, Lincoln Center, and various other places, goes higher than the piano, into dog whistle territory.”
I mention my perhaps-inaccurate memory of hearing Varèse say that Stokowski was the conductor he admired most. Golove replies: “I look back at that period and I say, here was a technology that was vastly ahead of its time in so many ways, meaning Theremin’s inventions in general. Look how few people were willing to invest themselves in this technology. As far as the theremin cello goes, Stokowski and Varèse were the only two people that we can name who really had anything to do with this seriously. So that makes them, to my way of thinking, really bold and visionary in their lack of fear, their lack of needing to see something establish itself before they’d be willing to tackle it. That’s incredibly admirable. And the other thing that I like about the Stokowski thing—there’s a certain amount of ridicule about these transcriptions, but the idea that musicians were willing to take the works that had been handed to them and get their hands on them and muck around and add something to them … our musical purity wants to erase that, but I love it.”
Given Golove’s exploratory spirit, it’s no surprise that his recent album of contemporary Mexican music—even though it’s played on a “regular” cello—runs against the grain of easy expectations. That’s especially true if you’re expecting music with some nationalistic grounding. “What’s going on now is not a folkloric movement any more,” he explains. “That did exist for an earlier generation but that’s not what modern Mexican composers are doing now.” So how did he find the particular composers, mostly fairly obscure, who appear on his CD? “The path that I took has a couple of starting points. One of them is that in the early-to-mid 1980s, I found a piece of sheet music in a wonderful music store in San Francisco where I was studying as an undergraduate.” Actually, what attracted him first was “the beautiful painting that was on the cover. The piece was
Quotations
by Mario Lavista, who is probably the best-known composer on the CD. It also begins with a quotation from Edgar Allen Poe, and that intrigued me, too. I bought it and then carried it around from city to city where I went. I looked through it, and I thought it looked like interesting music, but I never found someone who I wanted to play it with or who wanted to play this piece in particular.
“The next thing that happened was that I went with a group from the University of Buffalo to play in Mexico City. I had been signed up to lead an improvisational workshop for classical musicians. I found myself with a group of very inhibited classical musicians who had the idea that improvisation would be something fun to do; they wanted to know something about it. I was leading them through a series of exercises, trying to explore the intersections between avant-garde classical music
à la
Stockhausen and jazz improvisation. It turned out that on one side of the room, there were two guys, one of them a drummer and one an electric guitarist, who were playing away like mad. Very accomplished free jazz musicians. I didn’t really know what they were doing in this workshop, but they came to talk to me in the break and said, ‘We’re from Monterrey, Mexico, and our father, Nicandro Tamez, was a composer who died in the mid 80s. He left behind an enormous amount of music that has been unperformed since his death. He moved through a lot of phases, but gradually moved into a largely improvised, graphically notated music. Would you be interested in coming to Monterrey and learning something about this music?’
“So I said sure, I’d be interested. My focus had been largely on contemporary music and I considered myself an improviser because I’d been working with avant-garde jazz musicians, at this intersection between avant-garde classical composition and avant-garde jazz. And sure enough a formal invitation came fairly soon after, which began an association with a musical family. Because in addition to the two brothers, there was a sister who studied in Moscow. The mother was a flutist and a radio personality, a wonderful narrator for pieces. The younger of the two brothers, the guitarist, was also a composer and a real impresario for his father’s music and a promoter of jazz in Monterrey. So I got involved first in the father’s music and then in the son’s music. And I’ve recorded pieces by both of them.”
“The [graphical notation] system took shape over at least a decade and a half or so of his later works. Like other European and U.S. composers, he was inspired by electronic music, etc. But as he got more and more involved, he tried different approaches to it. It gradually evolved into his own language of symbols, which progressed to a stage where the score might look like an abstract painting, like a Paul Klee, but with very specific meanings to north/south/east/west or to different shapes. But it was a language that required some explanation and some time to live with. I had to find my place in it. Now having done it, I feel quite comfortable with those symbols. But at first, it seemed like an enormous amount of information to take in.”
“All of the scores that I know of his come with a key to the symbols. But sometimes trying to realize those instructions gets really complicated. There are rhythmic series that have to be followed; at the same time, intervallic progressions are to be respected; sometimes they are or are not invertible; they should be embellished with microtones or they shouldn’t be; chords should be formed in various ways, which of course is a challenge on the cello. You might be proceeding in one direction across a page and it implies that you’re getting faster but getting softer, but then you might execute a turn along an axis on the page and then you’re getting at that point louder but even faster or then slower or you’re moving more toward noise elements or more toward purely pitched elements. There can be a lot of information coming at you.”
I pose what I realize is a provocative question: If another cellist from another part of the world learned the same piece, could Golove recognize it as the same piece? “The pieces that I’ve recorded, yes, because they combine graphic and traditional elements,” he says. “So there’s no question at all that I’d recognize them. I know, from having listened to some performances of purely graphic pieces that I was involved in, where multiple performers are realizing the same score page at the same time, that I can listen to the other person’s part and I know where they are. Of course, I know in advance that they’re playing the piece. If I heard somebody playing a piece that’s purely graphic and I didn’t know what piece it was, I might not have enough clues to say, yes, it is
that
piece.
“In the course of getting interested in music in Monterrey, I got interested in the Lavista piece that I had in my possession for all this time. And then it turned out that Lavista had written a number of other pieces for cello, so I grabbed them and worked my way through all of those pieces. Coincidentally, a colleague of mine in the romance languages department was planning to bring Lavista to Buffalo, along with Arnaldo Coen, the painter of this cover that had initially enticed me in my first foray into Mexican music. So I had a chance to work with Lavista on his piece, and to meet Coen.”
The resulting album, says Golove, gains coherence in part because “the pieces are connected very much by their histories.” But in the process of putting it together, he’s also found a lot of other pieces, too: “That may be the subject of another recording project, a Part 2.”
As the trio disc reminds us, Golove is active as a composer as well as a cellist. To what extent does that play into his performances of improvised and semi-notated music? “I think it is important,” he says, “because … for example, in the case of a piece like Nicandro Tamez’s
Monomaquia
, it’s traditionally notated up to a point; then there’s a fairly extensive passage which is completely graphic, and then it resumes being fully notated. So I have to ask myself as a musician—whether as a performer or a composer—what does the piece need there? What would enhance this notated piece? But even more importantly, I think, how can this improvisation relate to what comes before and after it? Because otherwise, it doesn’t really make sense as a piece.” To put it in different terms, the score offers opportunities he needs to resist: “The improvised music gives me freedom to do something that would be really very out of keeping with the music that comes before and after. I
could
do that, and in order
not
to do that, I need to think in a composerly sort of way about what the material of the piece actually is and how I can extend that material with freedom but still with a kind of structure. Of course, I don’t write it out, so I’m not literally composing a section of this piece. I’m trying to do it spontaneously. I’m trying to immerse myself to a point where I can improvise with those materials.”
So if he plays
Monomaquia
three times, how different would the performances be? “Fairly different,” he replies, “but not extraordinarily different, because the symbols are the same each time, and they’re not
that
free. They give me the register the gesture should take, the contour the gesture should take, they tell me something about proportionality. So the range of things that I’m going to do each time is not that wide.”
As I’ve said, Golove also performs jazz, although he doesn’t consider himself a “jazz musician.” As he puts it, “I am
tolerated
by jazz musicians. I am extraordinarily honored to be invited by them to play with them on a lot of occasions. But I am not a jazz musician by training. I’m an improvising musician by inclination and now by a certain amount of experience, but the background training of a jazz musician is very different, and I’m never going to be able to reconstruct that. But as long as they like to work with me, I love to work with them. So we seem to find a meeting point that is fruitful and I love to do it.”
In fact, his training was as an old-fashioned classical performer, “But I had a lot of contemporary-music listening experience. My father, who was a very dedicated listener of classical music and a major record collector, insisted on exposing me to more and more avant-garde music as I got a little bit older. So I listened to
The Rite of Spring
and
Pierrot Lunaire
when I was fairly young, and as I got older we went to Berio and Stockhausen, all of which he appreciated. He didn’t give me a lot of technical description of what was going on, but … I really went from there when I reached the university.” He went to Berkeley. “I had a wonderful cello teacher, Bonnie Hampton, who’s now at Juilliard. They had a very strong graduate composition program, so I had the opportunity to work with younger composers and to play music that hadn’t been played ever before, which seemed like such a great thrill. And I still think it is. But it was really my first experience at that. And at the same time, I had a lot of rock and roll background of listening as a child of the 70s, so I had dug my way into the more obscure corners of popular music. All these things kind of mixed together for me.”
Given these radically different idioms and experiences, I wonder whether there is a “single” Jonathan Golove, or whether he’s a different person, depending on whether he’s playing Beethoven, or jazz, or Lavista. “I think there is one ‘me’ in all those situations,” he says. “Maybe there are moments in an improvised performance when you tap into another side of who you are, but I think that my approach is very similar in all cases. I’m a reader of texts, and I’ll work from anything. I’m pretty non-categorical in that. You can give me a drawing on paper, you can give me very specific music notation, and I’m happy in all those different worlds, and I enjoy the challenge of going back and forth between them.” But what does it mean to be a reader of texts? “I see myself as an interpreter who wants to try to find out what a composer was about and to realize, to the best of my ability, their intentions with the piece. You get into all kinds of problems when you’re thinking intentions. But if you know something about what the composer’s music seems to be, the world that the composer’s music ought to inhabit or seems to inhabit, then you ought to try to stay there.”
He gives an illustrative counterexample: “Years ago, I heard a German cellist who was very committed to avant-garde music performing Morton Feldman, an early Feldman solo cello piece that is completely in graphic notation. His approach seemed to be that the composer had given him very open instructions, and so he felt free to realize those instructions to make a music that sounded nothing like the music of that composer. As you were listening to it, you’d never have a clue that you were listening to a piece by Morton Feldman. He could justify all the decisions he made based on the rule system that Feldman had given him, but my feeling was that the piece still ought to sound like a Feldman piece. I operate from that kind of perspective. So that’s my composer’s intentionality.”
Which leads to Golove’s own work as a composer. The trio disc includes a piece called
Bad Dreams
, which turns out to be connected to a work in progress—a chamber opera, for two singers and a handful of instrumentalists, based on Dashiell Hammett’s
Red Harvest.
As a Hammett aficionado, I’m intrigued—but also puzzled. How can you write
Red Harvest
as an opera with two singers? “I wanted to write
Red Harvest
as an opera, it was a dream of mine, it was a plan—a nightmare—of mine,” he says. “The opportunity came about because the Festival of Aix-en-Provence, which is perhaps the most important French opera festival, was celebrating its 50th anniversary, and had appointed a very forward-looking director, Stephane Lissner. He had been running the Châtelet Theater, and subsequently La Scala. Aix-en-Provence had always had an element of being a training festival for singers, and Mozart was its specialty.” Lissner was a close associate of Boulez, and after consulting with Boulez, he set up a composition academy and “accepted proposals from young composers for either opera or ballet projects. I didn’t know all the details of what the commission would be like if it came through, but it seemed like an opportunity. They were intending to choose four composers, but they chose five, four of whom were based in Paris—though they were not all French—and one composer, a fifth, from the outside world.” That outsider was Golove.
“I think a great deal of it had to do with the fact that the man who was going to direct the opera projects, the wonderful French director Pierre Strosser, had been a great fan of the
roman noir
and was interested in the project. It was an incredible opportunity to work with a major director. And I thought, ‘How can you possibly do
Red Harvest
with two singers?’ Starting from the beginning, my idea was that if you were going to make an opera of a story which is so complicated, you had to do so in a kind of a technological way. You needed film, you needed to suggest scenery without actually making scenery happen, and this seemed to me an interesting and contemporary way to proceed. So my idea was that all of these many characters could be recorded voices, voices that were introduced as documentary elements in storytelling, but that you would tell the story, the crux of the matter, between the detective (the Continental Op) and Dinah Brand, who is the leading female character. So that’s what I set out to do.” Golove composed the central act, and they performed it. “It was a hit, actually. They really liked it.”
That was 1998: “It’s been a while. The two-movement piece for piano trio that you hear on the CD was my first attempt at extending the project. The first movement is a section from the first act of the opera; the second piece is from the third act.” Golove has made the decision to quote a variety of American pop music ranging from
The Gold Diggers’ Song
to Metallica’s
Enter Sandman
—and to do so quite subtly. How much does it matter whether audience catches those references? “I guess I’m committed to the old-fashioned idea that interesting works of art operate on multiple levels, so the references are certainly important to me,” he says. “They’re important first of all in providing me basic materials to work with. I’m always looking for that stuff. And then they typically generate some associations. So, for example, a scene in the opera that I call ‘Dinah’s Torch Song’—it’s a kind of anti-torch song where she’s decided to throw over her boyfriend for someone who will pay her better. It’s based on the Ellington song
Sophisticated Lady
. It’s a sophisticated listener who will catch the references to
Sophisticated Lady
, although once you’re made aware of them and you know the song, then it’s much more clear. Some of the references are really abstract; my references to Thelonius Monk’s
Evidence
, for example, will be all over the whole opera and are in the trio as well. There are very few moments with anything very literal …and it’s an abstract tune to begin with. So it’s more important to me, but at the same time, if you’re aware that it’s there, if you’re aware that it’s provided the basic material, you know there’s something about
Evidence
or about
Sophisticated Lad
’ that forms some kind of support or counterpoint to the ideas that are going on in the text. And I like that.”
And as should be obvious from the review below, there’s a good chance that you’ll like it, too.
VOCES INTERNAS: Contemporary Works for Cello
•
Jonathan Golove (vc); Stephen Manes (pn
1
); Emilio Tamez (perc
2
)
•
ALBANY TROY 1235 (74:13)
Nicandro TAMEZ
1
Introduccion al Duo I. Monomaquia.
ESPINOSA
1
Duo “De la Obscuridad a la Luz.”
LAVISTA
Cuaderno de viaje.
1
Quotations.
Omar TAMEZ
2
Las Voces Internas.
ELÍAS
Homérica
THOUGHTS AND DREAMS: Contemporary Works for Piano Trio
•
Baird Tr
•
ALBANY TROY 908 (70:00)
SEGERSTAM
Trio No. 2,
“Of Thoughts in One Movement.”
HENZE
Chamber Sonata.
SHARAFYAN
Trio No. 2,
“Dream of Dreams.”
GOLOVE
Bad Dreams.
MANSURIAN
Bagatelles
