A downtown irregular: John Zorn and the instability of mutability

"If Mozart were alive today, believe me, he'd be incorporating all those instruments [electric guitar, drum set, electric organ, saxophone, turntable] and writing for them. And he would also be listening to all this different music that is around. It's not an unusual thing for to creative person to be interested in creativity."

"If Mozart were alive today, believe me, he would be including all these instruments [electric guitar, drums, electric organ, saxophone, record player] and composing for them. And he would also be listening to all the different music that's out there. It's not an unusual thing for a creative person to be interested in creativity."

John Zorn

Roland Barthes argued that "Être d'avant-garde, c'est savoir ce qui est mort; être d'arrière-garde, c'est l'aimer encore" (To be avant-garde means to recognize what is dead; to be rearguard means to continue to love it). to John Zorn, a personality as multifaceted as he is restless and indifferent to others' categorizations (Conan Doyle would surely have made him a Baker Street irregular), happened-and still happens-to find himself to simultaneously occupying the two shores Barthes mentioned. Zorn's, however, is not a path between tradition and transgression, but the simultaneous occupation of several different, even opposing, contexts in which to negotiate space for something new. This curious and vibrant ubiquity, which is perhaps the result of an all-Jewish willingness and ability to place oneself unceasingly outside of any established custom, habit or tradition (Zorn, in fact, is not an irreverent enfant gâté, but an iconoclast in the midst of a beautiful maturity), is plausibly the most fascinating aspect of 'opera an omnivorous autodidact, who grew up and matured with no rules other than his own and use, therefore, to catch those who make the mistake of expecting from him an element of comforting predictability.

By the will of chance, Zorn has lived since his youth in a context where the usual hierarchies were subverted or confused-a fact not unusual in a poly-ethnic society, where it can happen, in the same family, to celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah, to have a mezuzah and to attend a church: not coincidentally, Zorn, who is also not an observant Jew, habitually wears tzitzit (the ritual bangs), not for a religious act but "for a spiritual fact," for a clinging, therefore, to of intimately felt certainties of identity, however-again! - outside the usual rules. Accustomed to listening to various kinds of music already in his family, an impatient and erratic student, he was able and willing to construct his own language from almost self-taught through a process that Mário and Oswald de Andrade would have no difficulty in exemplarily including in their theories on "cultural anthropophagy." On a voracious and continuous curiosity and intensive listening to an incalculable number of musical materials from from all over the place, Zorn built his own rigor and discipline, creating layers upon layers of different knowledge that, although seemingly unconnectable to each other, he nevertheless knew how to make them converse, unearthing referents and hidden references, unthought of allusions and coincidences, lost correspondences. The resulting linguistic unpredictability might seem chaotic to most or, worse still, eclectic or, worse still, an extreme offshoot of post-modernism, which adequately represents the discomfort of many in feeling deprived of the most comfortable but calcified customs.

Zorn makes use of the knowledge he possesses of the tradition to operate a "re-lexicalization" of them, rather than out of a transgressive will to itself. Instead, the reasoning he follows in certain works, which would seem to be clear only to him, has its own logic in outlining a path from roller coaster that forces the listener to to reveal the fragility of his own certainties. He would be wrong, however, if he thought that listening to his opera, in its many facets (documented moreover from a conspicuous record production), always and everywhere represents a challenge or a cruel game: in an apparent recomposition of the tower of Babel in which precisely the conspicuous diversity becomes the unifying factor, moments of exquisite lyricism and prolonged glimpses of ecstatic melodicism emerge, ineffable oases that make from trait d'union between reiterated materials in unstable balance in their reoccurrence but which, in repeating themselves albeit in different guises, create a trace, an associative "thin red line" that provides unity and logic. In fact, the author brings as an example the structuring of pitches in a work such as Varèse's Octandre or the use of intervals made from Elliott Carter or, again, the manipulation that in a page such as Elegy he made of multiple materials taken from Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maître: "I didn't actually identify phrases, I extrapolated them to use them to as quotations. Rather, I used the score in the way Schoenberg would make use of a twelve-tone series or pattern. I used it as a starting point. to times I reversed pitch sequences; to times I used viola pitches but attributed them to the flute; to times I took a rhythm from one instrument and pitches from another and put them together. (...) I would highlight certain areas that I liked and reuse them in a myriad of ways. I've never been interested in picking up an entire bar; I would say it's raw materials that I intend to exploit: this scale, this ensemble, this kind of multiphonics, etc., etc., etc. It's all so incredibly organic from leave me amazed" (quoted in Ann McCutchan, The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999).

Many post-modern authors ignore or deliberately disregard the rules and rely to on labels, to categories that one is then forced to to tick off in order to figure out in what sphere to include 'opera: pastiche, intertextuality, inter-referentiality, fragmentation, parody, "parostiche," absence of depth, fragmentation, fragmentation of the subject... Zorn'sopera would appear, on superficial analysis, to reject a common norm between author and listener, replacing it with an infinite plurality of languages; above all, it would appear to have no stylistic and individual figure so strong from as to be capable of being subverted, homaged and appropriated or lowered to opera by others: there would exist, therefore, only an impersonal language, made up of a thousand surfaces and citational games, in which it would not be possible to make a distinction between original and copy. In reality, from his voracity for knowledge the New York composer and instrumentalist drew a strict set of norms, rules and codes capable of holding up the practical scaffolding of his thought: far from inclining toward the irrational and cynical taste of citationist play, his opera (from the melodic "re-mediorientalization" of the Yiddish musical tradition to an interest in mysticism and magic, from the lyricism of a recent Lied production to the evocation of post-bop and post-Colemanian jazz improvisation, from thrash-jazz to expressive noise, from homages to the Jewish protagonists of twentieth-century popular music culture to the fantastic post-cage- ano, from the cruel and "bataillesque" Japanese eroticism to the interest in the most extreme languages of today's improvisational and popular experimentation to the permutatory and curious "conservatism" of academic works inspired by the lessons of Wuorinen, Boulez, Stravinsky, Carter, Xenakis, Schoenberg and Berg) fully reflects the restlessness in the face of the growing impossibility for the artist to contain the totality of the ecumene in a single work. He therefore compartmentalizes it, devoting to each aspect examined a linguistic specificity (shared with a small number of performers chosen by common feeling and by established habit of making music together: what might appear trivial in the hands of some, becomes innovative in those of others), drawn from his ability to relate a plurality of traditions and languages: few contemporary artists know how to express with such completeness and variety the desire for balance and integration among diversities expressed by the millennial Jewish diasporic experience.

Barbara Hannigan is another performer to whom Zorn dedicated the specificity of some works that the artist literally "lived" accompanied by the author. So much so that it may be difficult to "separate" from them, and it will be even more difficult for other performers to erase certain memories from memory. Jumalattaret, for example, dates back to 2012, but only the meeting between the author and Hannigan allowed it to live musically. It is a work whose text is taken from the Finnish national epic poem, Kalevala, composed from Elias Lönnrot in the mid-nineteenth century, based on poems and folk songs of Finland (mostly in Karelian, a dia- read closely related to Finnish). Lönnrot assembled and reconstructed the historical memory of the Finnish peoples through the songs produced by their traditional poetry, bringing together their early cosmogony and heroic/mythological cycle in one opera . In the case of Jumalattaret the text is, in fact, a pre-text, a praetextum, something ornamental and insubstantial, because the nine fragments, preceded from an invocation and followed from a postlude, which Zorn chooses and which are each dedicated to a female deity of the Sami people, are never sung but only murmured in what is configured as an ecstatic ritual expressed from a wordless vocalization of obtuse realization. If the opening invocation seems to presage an effusive melodic lyricism, in fact it soon vanishes to leave room to of furious, shamanic vocal acrobatics made even more difficult to manage from an out-of-sync piano part that does not share accents with the chant line at each beat beginning: an "anti-accompaniment" that continues throughout the work, sprinkling it with intricate and angular polyrhythmic figurations. A page imbued with a hypnotic and symbolic secular sacredness, homage to an indomitable feminine energy that also shines through in the physicality and gestures to which the performer is driven, Jumalattaret asks the voice to chirp, sigh, murmur, laugh in prey to possession, make daring leaps in register, bring out natural harmonics as in diphonic singing, cope with rhythmic sequences of extreme complexity, make herself a percussive instrument (the singer is even expected to play percussion and clap her hands), deal with prolonged lines in one breath (a phrase in which five bars of quavers are followed from a sustained note for an entire bar is exemplary at the beginning) and a deadly cadenza in which intonation runs risks at every step. Nonetheless, the variety that the composer manages to to achieve from a multiplicity of techniques from different languages (jazz, folk, the most extreme rock) has something, indeed, fluid and enchanting about it, in the transparencies of poignant beauty, in the sudden arcane melodies that alternate to an exaltation now chthonic, now Dionysian.

It is fitting, in such a context, that to a pianist of such considerable technical and expressive gifts as Stephen Gosling should be allowed, though the program does not compensate him with a moment's pause, to exhibit not only his skills but also the undoubted affinities he from long exhibits for Zorn's aesthetic (who, moreover, studied piano and organ before being a saxophonist). The five short pieces collected under the title Encomia ("Speculum," "Penumbra," "Stretta," "Occultation," "Arborescence") are short in duration but demand no small effort of virtuosity from the performer in meticulously exploring every possible phonic resource of the instrument, external and internal. Once again, to bursts of nervous energy alternate lunar flashes and moments of intimate, collected timbral and melodic beauty.

For Barbara Hannigan, the composer has also written in recent times (2021) a work of delicate filigree, yet animated from a tangible inner tension: Split the Lark, a collection of seemingly and deceptively fragile songs, is based on poems by Emily Dickinson and fragments found after her death, loose notes, annotations. Zorn, an author who is very attentive to the timbral dimensions and contextual expressive power of "mood," captures with fine penetration the visionary disquiet that lurks in gentle but significantly erratic writing, steeped in metaphysical elements and immersed in the concepts of American Transcendentalism, often punctuated by the rhythm of breath: the voice transforms into sounds what the text inspires in the author, few are the words spoken in these hummable lieder that seem to proceed on a razor's edge and hold secrets that could gush out violently from any moment. Despite the ineffable delicacy of the architecture, there is not a moment when a dark sense of nocturnal alertness and imbalance ready to to manifest itself loosens, which is characteristic of Zorn'sopera , which finds in Dickinson's verses an admirable raison d'être: the Mosaic will to always traverse the wilderness and not to lose the focus and consciousness of tran- sitoriality, the need not to stop and not to settle, the irrepressible impulse to go "beyond," beyond the momentary and prosaic illusion of fulfillment.

Gianni Morelenbaum Gualberto