NAMELESS For three wordless sopranos and two chamber ensembles: string quartet and flute, oboe, violin, cello,mandolin and guitar. Written for the Momenta Quartet and the Cygnus Ensemble
Nameless bears an inscription from the single greatest work of Jewish Philosophy, The Guide to the Perplexed of Moses Maimonides (1120-1190). The Guide to the Perplexed, written in dialogue with Muslim theologians, argued the existence of Deity by negation: Whatever is Deity can’t be described; what can be described is not Deity. Hence, the title Nameless. Nameless is a long, wordless psalm. It is not descriptive; rather, it is a series of images—reflection, ecstasy, reverence, idyll and dance--expressed through fugue, chorus dialogue and aria. These are signposts for the listener that point outward to musical expressions of the ineffable in every culture and time. The negative attributes have this in common with the positive, that they necessarily circumscribe the object to some extent, although such circumscription consists only in the exclusion of what otherwise would not be excluded. In the following point, however, the negative attributes are distinguished from the positive. The positive attributes, although not peculiar to one thing, describe a portion of what we desire to know, either some part of its essence or some of its accidents; the negative attributes, on the other hand, do not, as regards the essence of the thing which we desire to know, in any way tell us what it is, except it be indirectly ........
Guide to the Perplexed LVIII
GREENBAUM Venerable Canons 1. Wild Rose, Lily, Dry Vanilla 2. Chaconne by Attrition 3. Nameless 4 1Tara Helen O’Connor (fl), Calvin Wiersma (vn); 2 Re’ut Ben-Ze’ev (s), Cygnus Ens; 3 Miranda Cuckson (vn); 4 Elizabeth Farnum, Julie Bishop, Priscilla Smith Herreid (s), Cygnus Ens, Momenta SQ FURIOUS ARTISANS (51:55)
Matthew Greenbaum (b.1950) is committed to a language less in favor today: intense, highly chromatic, packed with detail, brimming with ideas. But this is not the setup for the sort of facile dismissal that usually follows such a description. One of the fringe benefits of the stylistic tidal shift that has occurred over the past couple of decades is that those composers who have kept the faith with the postwar modernist language really do have the faith: they refuse to bow to fashion, they’re in it from genuine commitment…and Greenbaum is one of them.
Guitarist (and Cygnus Ensemble director) William Anderson’s notes point out that Greenbaum is the sole living student of both Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky. Influence of both is audible in Greenbaum’s music, but the former is far more significant. Wolpe remains one of the most important yet undersung composers of the concert music tradition in the second half of the 20th century. His music is strict, fiercely uncompromising, and sonically gripping. He developed a technique tangentially related to “classic” serialism, but far more flexible: as a result one hears motivic shapes and harmonic forces of cohesion and dissolution far more evidently than in comparable music.
Greenbaum’s work shares elements not only with Wolpe but Webern (strict forms such as canon) and late Stravinsky (a highly idiomatic, concise, sectional approach to a piece’s structure, along with a brilliant, shimmering, and transparent sound). This collection has two instrumental and two vocal works, and one is a magnum opus.
Both instrumental works are for small forces but pack a lot of information. Venerable Canons (2007) are four quicksilver movements for flute and violin, in which one can clearly hear the canonic structure. It’s a tribute to Greenbaum’s imaginative manipulation of material and context that they feel so different to one another. Chaconne By Attrition (2006) for solo violin uses a similarly strict form, and once again one hears over its ten minutes a constant flow of imaginative variation. And somehow amongst the prolix information, one senses the common ground from which it all emerges and returns.
Nameless (2008-09) is remarkable. This is a tribute to the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who posited that the unnameability of a supreme being is the ultimate proof of its existence. The instrumentation is striking--string quartet; instrumental sextet of flute, oboe, violin, cello, mandolin and guitar; and three female voices, all in vocalise. The result, almost a half hour, is an austere and ritualistic, but mysterious in that one never knows just what it’s actually evoking (a sign that the composer’s spiritual and aesthetic intentions are being met). I was reminded of many of Stravinsky’s late works, such as Agon, Threni, and Sermon, Narrative and Prayer, and this comparison is a high compliment indeed. The tone ranges from prayerful to playful to scorching. It’s a work I know I can listen to repeatedly, finding both sustenance and fresh insights. Robert Carl