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Dear Listener,
This is the enemy speaking. At least by association. A radio programmer for a classical music station can't exactly call himself a front-liner on the barricades of new music. Radio is still a little suspicious of Debussy.
I met Mary Ellen Childs in the summer of 1993. She was a guest for one installment of a radio series called the Composer's Voice at Minnesota Public Radio. For me, the interview and her music were part of a small education pointing the way out of the land of the legendary and the dead.
So while I remain the enemy, still dishing out all those Brandenburgs and Hungarian Rhapsodies in Blue and such, I've apparently shown enough signs of rehabilitation to be entrusted with this text.
The six pieces on this disc were composed between 1988 and 1993. Kilter is significant as the title because it displays Mary Ellen's habit of insisting we remember what, if left to ourselves, we'd be quite happy to forget.
Kilter is a word meaning good condition, state of health or spirits; order. Yet it's mysterious as the effect of a good joke is mysterious, or the taste of garlic. The Greeks didn't invent kilter, nor did the Romans. You won't find its origin in Saxon runes or bawdy tales from Brittany.
Until now. See the country you're getting into?
No one knows where kilter comes from. And we refer to it only when we're out of it.
Kilter has the two pianists working out cooperative ventures and independent exercises: their voices may entwine like the laces of a cat's cradle; or they may line up, play off one another, part company altogether. They seem to have decided, in this democratic world of two, to allow for disagreement and embrace it. Chaotic experience isn't the dark side of order, something to be suppressed. To know order is to know and embrace its opposite. And to blur the distinction between the two.
Mary Ellen enjoys the idea that distinctions between on emotion and its (apparent) opposite, or the sound of one instrument and its contrasts, can be blurred; indeed, that distinctions ought to be blurred.
We forget the concept of kilter as we tend to forget, through that drowsy, irresistible process by which words obediently follow one another in chant or fuse themselves into phrase, that what is now absent must, in some other place or time, be present. Like a physicist on the trail of atomic particles in a bubble chamber, our language strongly hints at the presence of kilter by identifying where it's been, but is no longer. The conception of kilter requires that out-of-kilter exist. Out-of-kilter implies the existence of kilter. They depend upon each other.
This is almost too much for a broadcaster to get his mind around.
Mary Ellen Childs isn't normally what you'd call an outspoken person, but with the courage of her convictions behind her, she decries prevailing opinion and prejudice. For instance, I know people who keep accordions in closets, who deny ever learning the thing as kids; the pain of ridicule and Myron Floren* associations are that vivid. But Mary Ellen loves the accordion, and says so, publicly. "Visually, it's remarkably beautiful. And it has the characteristics of keyboard, wind and reed instruments in one. It's one instrument, but an ensemble all by itself."
Ensemble is key here; Mary Ellen is a fan of the spirit of cooperation inherent in ensemble work. In Four of One of Another, a string quartet joins Guy Klucevsek's accordion for another democratic session of blurring who's who.
Whistling in the Dark, also played by Klucevsek, is whimsical and edgy—a series of melodic runs interrupted before they can quite get off the ground, as if the effort to whistle a happy tune were subverted by a troublesome memory. And The Capacity of Calm Endurance, written for pianist Anthony de Mare, is a meditation on the rewards and pains of patience (the title is one of the dictionary definitions of "patience"). They appear to be solo pieces, but the world of Mary Ellen Childs is a little like Wonderland: solo instruments are protean, acting out many roles at once.
But her ensemble work Parterre, is a unicycle—eccentric, colorful, full of surprises and an ironic sense of balance, though in the end making its way as one. A "parterre" is an ornamental, patterned garden. I can picture Alice wandering through this one, exploring both its sunny and foreboding regions. If she remembers where she is, she'll also remember that one can't exist without the other.
Mary Ellen's compositional world is mostly a wordless one. Her delights are rhythmic patterns and instrumental voices at play with one another. Songs, like Night, composed in 1992, have been rare. But since this collection, like the bubble chamber, indicates where she's been and not where she is, it can't yet track her developing interest in pop songs.
I've been the enemy now for a long time, which means years spent in that Valhalla where composing lives are over, reputations are hardened into marble, and music is mantled not only with deathlessness, but deathless intent. After a while we who distrust Now actually begin to believe in the inevitability we claim for art once it's born, grown, and (even better) dead, buried, and eulogized.
By way of defection (which was inevitable), this appreciation of Now: these pieces may help us determine who the artist is and what her imagination has created, but they're tracks in a bubble chamber—allusive, suggestive, a clue, but not conclusive. She's not there anymore. She's moved on, compelled like the rest of us to negotiate a strange, often lovely land, in an oddly menacing time. What she writes are signposts in that land, or lanterns which led the way home one night.
—Bill Morelock
Bill Morelock is co-host and producer of the daily classical music program Bob and Bill on National Public Radio. He is also co-host of NPR's The Composer's Voice, a series of interviews with composers.
*For those of us who didn't grow up with The Lawrence Welk Show, Myron Floren was the accordionist on that show, (Publisher's Note)
When I'm asked, as a composer, to describe what I do, I usually say that my work follows two parallel (racks: instrumental music and visual-musical pieces. The second category is harder to define (it includes pieces for crash cymbal players on roller stools, pieces with lighting design, videowall pieces) but, ironically, it's easier to talk about. I can talk about the visual component, my un-composer-like working methods, the uniqueness of the forms. But it's the first category that comprises this collection.
Musical language is abstract. That's one of the reasons I was drawn to it as a means of expression. Which means that it's not easy to talk about my instrumental pieces. What do I say? They are conceived in abstract terms and constructed in musical thought. I can't say what they are "about." There are no stories, no literal themes.
There are no complex musical structures or procedure sense of balance, my own internal logic. I proceed from moment to moment asking myself "what seems to want to happen next?" "what next?" following my musical logic at any given ahead and making the details fit some overall scheme.
I use no unusual notation. Thee are no unusual working processes, though I have developed relationships with nearly all the musicians for whom I write. The Capacity of Calm Endurance was written for Anthony de Mare Four of One of Another for the Kronos Quartet, and Parterre for Relache. I knew all of these musicians before I wrote pieces for them. Guy Klucevsek, for instance, I've been writing for and having dinner with for the last ten years. I'm convinced that something of my knowledge of someone finds its way into a piece, though I couldn't tell you what or exactly how that happens.
And so, in the spirit of KILTER, that word that is used only in the pi its opposite, I'll let this no-description be a description) of sorts, an telling you what I'm not, what my music is not, I've given you some information about both of us. The rest, I hope, is contained in those instrumental abstractions, and one song, that make up this collection.
- Mary Ellen Childs
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