Liner notes by Stephanie Griffin for the cd, “Psalter and Other Works”
New York City conjures up an image of brashness and invincibility. Matthew Greenbaum is a quintessential New Yorker of his generation and longtime denizen of the city’s cultural life; yet his music, surreal and lyrical, suggests rather a nostalgia for the historical past.
Greenbaum's wide-ranging interest in world literature and philosophy (he also reads in French and German) has been the source of many titles and text-settings, which include both Nietzsche (Untimely Observations for viola and piano), and the Psalms (Psalter, for mezzo soprano and chamber ensemble (a tribute to his aunt, Sylvia Benjamin, who worked to resettle survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after the Second World War). The duo for baritone sax and piano on the river the shadowy group contains a movement entitled “Landscape of the Vomiting Multitudes,” a poem in Garcia Lorca’s A Poet in New York). The chamber opera A Floating Island is based on the Laputa episode in Gulliver’s Travels; and the monodrama Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, for baritone and string quartet, is a setting of the eponymous Whitman poem. I Saw the Procession of the Empress on First Avenue is a music animation whose title refers to a surreal moment when the composer, riding the First Avenue bus and reading The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon (a court lady Heian Japan), came across the line “I saw the procession of the empress on First Avenue” (this one in Medieval Kyoto).
Greenbaum cultivates a sound world reminiscent of historical music. This is not surprising, given his early experience as a recorder virtuoso. It is reflected in his instrumentation, which often calls to mind the Renaissance broken consort. At times he writes for the instruments themselves, as in his inclusion of the arch lute in A Floating Island. His love of early music also permeates his writing for modern instruments; he lavishes the stringed instruments with abundant rolled chords while discouraging overt vibrato and portamento, which he abhors. And he pays careful attention to details of articulation and timbre, aiming to strip his music of the remnants of nineteenth-century rhetoric.
Traces of early music are also apparent in Greenbaum's approach to form, and in movement titles such as Minuet, Gigue, Aria sopra passacaglia, Forme fixe and Hocquetus. Many of these movements are miniatures. Other works are sectionalized, in the manner of a rondeau or canzona.
His love of language, typical of someone who sees the world in puns and anagrams, also engages in a kind of wordplay with the basic elements of music. (The title of the work for oboe and piano, Nod Quiet Ox, is an anagram of Don Quixote, which itself contains anagrams and structural games.)
Along with early music, Greenbaum's other major influences were his teachers Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky. Wolpe introduced Greenbaum to the imaginative free play of small, identifiable pitch sets. This approach manifests itself in the composer's melodic writing; his melodies usually comprise a limited number of pitches that take root in the listener's consciousness throughout the course of any given movement or piece. From Davidovsky he learned to use composite timbres within a stereophonic musical landscape, as in the first movement of his string quartet, Castelnau.
An additional yet related feature is his frequent use of repeated notes. In more lyrical moments, this lends his music a searching, introspective quality, as in Elegy, Hôtel de l'Étoile, the Aria sopra passacaglia from A Floating Island and the slow movements of Untimely Observations.
Wolpe also taught Greenbaum the simultaneous use of musical elements in the foreground, middleground and background. Greenbaum's interpretation of this idea can be heard in his treatment of melody, where carefully placed dynamics and articulations build out the contour into multiple voices This gives his chamber music the effect of a melody in a hall of mirrors, its elements reflected back at it through the other instruments in various guises. His taste for primarily diatonic intervals lends his harmonies a shimmering, ambient sonority.
The spirit of both his teachers is present in what Greenbaum describes as multidimensional sound-space. The idea is visual in origin and can be traced back through Wolpe to the Bauhaus, and from Davidovsky and Varèse back to the Futurists. In any case, Greenbaum is happy to invoke visual art: Cythera is an homage to Watteau and the French Baroque; Hôtel de l'Étoile is the title of a Joseph Cornell box.
The paradox of this music is that, despite its seeming abstraction, it still possesses a distinctive pictorial quality. In Greenbaum's hands, musical texture seems to take on specific liquid or solid qualities - or values of light and air. This is apparent in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and in the Aria sopra bordone movement from Psalter, the first portraying the Hudson River at night; the second, a Biblical vision of the ocean. Beyond the engaging surface of these works and the composer's refined historical sense, it is this visual aspect that lends Greenbaum's music its unique luminosity.
