Frank Brickle got his PhD, and all of his earlier degrees at Princeton where he studied with Milton Babbitt. He never had an academic career, so he cannot be accused of being an academic composer, but he has always been a full time composer. For some years he had a gig working with a think tank in Princeton--the Center for Communications Research, working in abstarct mathematics, as well as some very interesting applications thereof. His work was often highly classified and tied-in with the NSA. Secret government work--he had that in common with Milton Babbitt & Andrew Imbrie. He was sometimes serving as a government spook, but he retired from all that after winning a big award for his work on the development & refinement of software-defined radio, a technology that helped in some key US military efforts.
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Brickle was also like Babbitt and others who, when the world was not knocking down their doors demanding their music, happily retired to their electronic music studios where they flourished in a fashion; but in both cases, musicians did come knocking at their doors. Both Brickle and Babbitt responded to the somewhat surprising (to them) interest in their work from real fleshly musicians by gradually adapting their work to the practical needs of living players.
My interest in Brickle's work culminates in the present release of Brickle's CD on Furious Artisans Records. For over 20 years, I've felt he was onto something. The present CD is a harvest of the fruits of what he was onto in those early days. He was onto a radical stylistic change, as he applied his Princetonian techniques toward music that didn't sound anything like Babbitt. I will talk about that a bit, and it'll be kinda boring. I want to make one point that I hope will speak clearly and simply to non-musicians: Each of Brickle's recent vocal works elicits distinct and wonderfully contrasting dramatic personae from his singers. This gives a wonderful breadth to his vocal music. His instrumental music is characterized by an analogous specificity of concept and dramatic intent. Contextuality--yes; but if that word means nothing to you, think instead in terms of *distinct* dramatic personae, whether it is vocal or abstract instrumental music that he's offering. For the Furious Artisans website, I put it this way:
In The Creation, Abghari, as God, lovingly sings of the creation's bounty of forms,day by day, culminating on the 4th and 5th days with a deeply moving kind of bluesey American weltschmertz. The mystery play continues with the angels--Lucifer and his fall--as Abghari becomes the irresistable embodiment of a boy soprano, a loveable little solipsist who eventually gets his comeuppance. Elizabeth Farnum opens the recording with Farai un vers, Brickle's setting of a famous and famously enigmatic poem by Guillaume D'Aquitaine, the "first troubadour," set in its original language, Occitan. Farnum shakes the rafters with her jaunty-slapstick-cabaret delivery -- Edif Piaf & Lotte Lehmann meet Rosemary Clooney and the Andrews sisters.
As his music can be too sweet for modernists and too modern for some lay listeners, I never really knew how far I'd get promoting Brickle's music. On a whim I applied to the NEA one quiet summer when I devoted some time to grant writing at a Kinko's in Vancouver, B.C. A year later, out of the blue, I got a nice letter from the NEA, learning that Brickle won. My proposal stated that Brickle's work must be documented because his work demonstrates how compositional techniques from the high modernist 20th Century can be adapted to serve 21st C. aesthetics. The NEA award represented a real vindication for my 20-year interest in Brickle's music.
Brickle & I share an admiration for the Bangers on Cans & the minimalists. We like a lot of that music, and we are grateful for those movements for showing how new music can be appealing, not arrogantly self-satisfied and off-putting. And nevertheless, Brickle & I agree that there is much that those contingents sacrificed that we do not wish to sacrifice. Moreover, we were convinced that there was no need for such sacrifices. Many fascinating modernist principles were thrown out to achieve the lovely clarity and transparency that we find in minimalist music.
I tried to make a case for Brickle's recent work in an article in Ben Boretz' Open Space entitled, "A Mannerist Maximalist". Babbitt dubbed himself a "maximalist" to parry the minimalist thrust. What would a late-phase (mannerist phase) of that maximalism sound like? I don't remember how I answered the question in that article, but I'll try to sketch a better answer here and now. Even in the last nine months as I was immersed in Brickle's music, preparing for the recording sessions for this disc, I have come to understand how he's been pulling together many elements (some quite disparate) of the Princeton music scene of his day (the '70s).
Stravinsky's work between the wars showed a deceptively rich and complex approach to non-triadic diatonic music. One of many possible quick glosses is particularly relevant here: symmetrical, non-diatonic collections spanning pairs of diatonic collections. The result is lovely, and it very familiar. Much of today's music, from Steve Reich to John Adams, comes out of Stravinsky's chromatically-inflected diatonic soundworld. The Stravinskian soundworld of non-triadic diatonic music is very much the soundworld of minimalism and post-minimalism. My problem with Stravinksy and with much music today is that it lacks the kind of large-scale architecture that we see in Brahms and Schoenberg. Hard sectional divisions are a problem for me in Stravinsky. Sometimes the hard shifts can be expressive in their own right, but for the most part, I am disappointed with Stravinsky's stitching-together of one section after another. We excuse these sections because we know they are ballet numbers.
Brickle pays deliberate hommage to the Stravinskian diatonic surface. His recent work is of that soundworld, but he creates the large arcs that I miss in Stravinsky, and he employs a powerful arsenal of 20th C. compositional techniques to make this happen.
Very roughly: Brickle's recent work is a synthesis of Babbitt & Stravinsky. Twelve tone thinking in the background supports a Stravinskian surface that, to me, flows better than Stravinsky, is of a grander architecture. I always admired Wuorinen's amplifications of Stravinsky's 12-tone work. Brickle does it much differently than Wuorinen, and for me Brickle's approach is equally compelling.
I have come to appreciate just how much of Brickle's seamlessness, his large arcs, comes not from Babbitt, but from another Princeton guru--Jim Randall. Brickle, like Babbitt and Sessions and Schoenberg, thinks in terms of sounds (the particular flavor that comes with specific collections of pitches) and their prolongations. A tune lays down a collection of pitches--a focal harmony--that can be extended and prolonged. In tonal music, the tonic triad is prolonged first by passage through some or all of the remaining notes of the tonic key (diatonic extension), and later, on a grander scale, by transpositions to other keys (chromatic extensions). Jim Randall apparently railed long and hard against the blythe *erasing* of the focal harmony. Composers get something going, set something into motion, only to burn all bridges to it through hard shifts. Brickle took this to heart. He aspires to chromatic extensions of his focal harmony that happen without big bumps, shocks to the nervous system. He's doing this:
[focal collection]---[passage through other pitches]--[return of focal collection]
How to extend the sound, the collection through other pitches (or the entire complement) without erasing the quality of the focal collection? Brickle takes great care with this problem. The process above defines foreground harmonic motion--how to move and land back where you began.
I suspect Ed Cone's fascinating discussions about rhythm had a great impact on Brickle's approach to larger scale issues. Cone was another fixture of the Princeton scene when Brickle was a student there. The scheme above is a middle ground rhythm (phrase-level rhythm). How to twist that rhythm so that another collection is landed? (A different collection or a transposition.)
Finally, Ben Boretz' *Metavariations* is vital to Brickle's work. Recently I became aware of Boretz' discussion of tetrachords in Starvinsky's Petrouchka. I reminded Brickle of this and he immediately conceded that, "So much of what he [Boretz] was saying is part of my permanent mental furniture."
The best of Brickle's Stravinsky-Babbitt synthesis is probably still to be seen. Brickle is now working on a commission for Cantori, NY, a work for mixed choir, saxophone and string quartet. He contends that, if pressed, he can give a pretty good accounting of how the 12-tone background is elaborated into the foreground. I'm looking forward to another dazzling demonstration of how that foreground can be convincingly carried forward into the large-scale architecture. I expect him to do this in surprising ways that involve thinking that has been largely and needlessly dismissed, lost in the last reactions to high modernism. The new work for Cantori, NY is slated for a first performance in the first part of 2012.
--William Anderson
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