And Trouble Came - Musical Responses to AIDS

This is a CD relating to the ever-present issue of AIDS, in both its Western and its African guise. This may seem a gloomy subject for musical thought, but then again, an obvious one. It has happened in so called popular music, and even in experimental music, like in “Blue” by Derek Jarman on Mute Records – so why not in Western art music!

“All the Way Through Evening” (“Five Nocturnes for Baritone & Piano) (1990) by Chris deBlasio is the first work, composed for baritone and piano and the poems of Perry Brass. Both the composer and the singer are already gone, in a ghastly was illustrating the graveness of the subject that these art works deal with.

The music itself appears like a classical lieder set, however with modern texts, albeit timeless in their universality.
Perry Brass, who wrote the poems, explains that his idea to write something about the experience – mental or physical – of AIDS, occurred to him about four years before the death of composer Chris deBlasio. As Brass conveyed this to deBlasio he backed off, saying he would have nothing to do with the idea. He has recently been diagnosed, and it was all too much for him at that point. A year later, though, he had set five of the poems. They appear here. The poetry cycle had been written for baritone Michael Dash, and it was a moving moment the first time Perry Brass met with deBlasio and Dash to hear the pieces. It all fitted, and made up a magnificent and touching set of modern lieder about the sufferings of present day mortal man.

The texts of the set are reprinted in the CD booklet, even though Michael Dash’s articulation is so clear you don’t really need the written texts to follow. The poems are naked in their calm despair, applicable to any situation of grief, of loss, of inevitable death.

The second work is the 30-minute “Self Requiem” (1994/1995) by C. Bryan Rulon, played by Musicians’ Accord, with a computer tape by Curtis Bahn. The composer says that this music is written in memory of his friend Layman Foster who died of AIDS in 1994.
After a somber, silent, lamenting emergence, this piece moves on into a minimalistic progression in the vein of Steve Reich, especially in the percussive rhythms of the xylophone (?) and the counterpoints of the wind instruments, causing drifting musical layers to shift, stretch and contract the sounding events. About eleven minutes into the piece Curtis Bahn’s tape part takes over (interacting, though, with the instrumentalists), moving the listening experience into a totally different, dreamy, hallucinatory state, like in the first stages of death, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Emanuel Swedenborg alike. The dead person does not grasp the fact that he is dead, and experiences all kinds of delusions on his way to rebirth.
The composer refers to “On Death and Dying” by Dr. Kubler-Ross (1960s), and the series of emotional states that he describes in terminally ill cancer patients.

Laura Kaminsky concludes this CD with “And Trouble Came: An African AIDS Diary” (1993/1996). She says that the work is “the unlikely product of a commission, a journey and a dream”. The commission was indeed for a piece about AIDS, and she happened to be in Ghana at the time to teach at The National Academy of Music. With the intent to gather information and background for her commission she traveled the land, meeting different people, like two dedicated American nuns (Sisters Margaret Moran and Dr. Marie Ego) and two young men from Ghana (Jonathan Anane and Dauda Kramo) suffering from the horrendous disease. After the emotional meeting with the two young men in the village of Berekum she had a dream, which positioned her composition in her mind, allowing for her development of it. In the dream a narrator was recounting Kaminsky’s meeting with the nuns and the two men to an audience. The dream incited her to write a series of diary entries to be interwoven with the texts she had already chosen, from the Bible and from the writings of Pablo Neruda and others.

The effect that Kaminsky achieves through this method remind me of some pieces by Judith Weir, like “The Consolations of Scholarship”, “Missa del Cid” and “King Harald’s Saga”, all appearing on a CD from Novello Records called “Three Operas”. The spoken parts are there, the music of the ensemble and the Biblical texts. This is a very effective method too, making for an interesting listening situation, almost like a “Cinéma pour l’oreille”, evoking landscapes and pictures – scenes – in the listener’s mind. The diary entries written by Kaminsky are strong, moving accounts, worthy of being issued by themselves, as literature – since I suppose she has written much more than the excerpts used here and reprinted in the booklet.
The music is interesting, intricate – and well played by the Fidelio Trio, producing a full, vibrant sound. Following in the tradition of Derek Jarman’s “Blue” (which also features a narrative story in brief flashes) and the operas of Judith Wear, Laura Kaminsky adds something very special of her own talent, her own insights, her own artistic integrity and intuition, in this masterpiece of hers, and she moulds the music perfectly around the textual content.

The concluding poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson is a moving account, getting the message across in a violent surge of feelings, and the narrator - Mark Lamos - with his soft, yet forceful and intense rendering, makes all justice to the material!

Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem: