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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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GOES LONGHAIR (FILM AT ELEVEN?) |
 RICHARD WERNICK ...Pulitzer prize composer |
A Greenhorn’s Night
At A Music Premiere
of TheColumnists.com
I don’t know much about music and I don’t know what I like.
But I am snob enough to want to experience the rarified atmosphere of an avant-garde musical performance that includes a composition by somebody I know. So it was a thrill when my new friend, composer Dick Wernick, surrendered to my persistent requests to attend one of his concerts and invited me to the world premiere of his composition, String Quartet No. 7.
I liked the idea of mixing it up with the longhairs only weeks after I had attended a raucous Eagles-Giants football game.
“A world premiere,” I said. “Wow.”
“You sure you want to go?” Wernick said.
“Of course.”
“You are very brave.”
This was a man who won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 1977 and yet he was being defensive. “Because,” he said, “the public has a resistance to avant-garde or new music. People don’t understand it so they look as if they are being lashed with a cat o’nine tails. Yet all music is new at first. A few hundred years ago Beethoven music was new to people.”
Wernick’s String Quarter No. 7 is a piece of polyphonic music. “That scares people,” Wernick said, “but in its simplest form it’s ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ One person starts and another person picks up the melody against itself.”
His piece, 15 minutes long, shared an evening bill of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society at the Seaport Museum in Philadelphia on Nov 25. It was sandwiched between string quartets by Haydn and Beethoven played by the Julliard Quartet.
The Juilliard Quarter originated with students
at the Juilliard school after World War II and has continued
ever since though there are no original members still playing.
String quartets, Wernick explained to this greenhorn, always
consist of two violins, a viola and a cello.
The chamber music society audience of about 500 was obviously
knowledgeable about all the music on the program. The highlight
was Wernick’s piece, and I sensed an excitement in the audience
for the occasion.
The Juilliards got an ovation at the end of String Quarter No. 7. Wernick, beaming, went up to the stage, and laid kisses on the four seasoned male musician’s cheeks. People then came over to his seat to congratulate him and his wife, Bea, an accomplished badoonist. I loved that.
Wernick is almost 65, goateed with longish white hair. He looks like a musician. He was born and raised in the Boston area, took to music at the same time he was playing hockey for Newtown High. I am impressed that he was a fan of the long defunct, hapless Boston Braves.
He has been a figure in Philadelphia music circles for decades, a professor at Penn. He has composed a slew of solo, chamber and orchestral works and written for the theater, films and ballet.
String Quarter No. 7 was inspired by the music of 15th century Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem. Wernick said that at first “his only meaning for me was getting his name spelled more or less correctly on my music history final in college.”
He said, Ockeghem (whom he allowed me to call ‘Ocky’ for the sake of our conversation) “was reviled at first, but many of the 16th and 17th century composers evolved off him. Bach’s life blood is polyphonic music.”
String Quartet No. 7 is an augmentation canon and the Ocky-inspired technique is, he said, “sufficiently intimidating” to keep the number of composers using it rather exclusive.
Wernick’s first string quartet was written in the early 1960s for a Bay Shore High School, Long Island string quartet. He built on each quartet, making them more mature and complex as he went on, but there is a warm spot in his heart for the original; he keeps a framed photo of the high school quartet.
His No. 6 quartet, commissioned by the Jerusalem String Quartet, was played in Jerusalem. Another piece, “Kaddish-Requiem,” a secular service for the victims of Indo-China, drew these comments from a New Mexico critic:
“If you enjoy music that stirs the intellect and the emotions--that stretches your imagination as you listen, don’t miss tonight’s performance. The music stands on its own without the need for explanation or a story to tie it to an event in American life….the emotional effect is enough to move the listener to tears. The reason for this impact lies with Wernick’s genius, and the reality of it was apparent from the expressions of the people in the audience Sunday.”
In the face of that verbiage it is more than a bit lame of me to say only that I enjoyed Wernick’s No. 7, that it was not as jarring as I was afraid it might be, not at all like John Cage’s cacophony. I am in awe that the piece took him more than a year to write. His wife, Bea, said, “He would go down to his study, work for a few hours and then come up sweating, as if he had been digging ditches.” I certainly look forward to the upcoming release of a CD that will include three of Wernick’s pieces.
He has won an armload of awards, the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for the piece entitled, “Visions of Terror and Wonder” which was played at the Aspen, Col. Music Festival. It is based on three scriptural sources, Isaiah, the Koran and the Book of Revelation.
The Pulitzer Prize earned him $3,000. “I was getting calls of congratulations from all over,” he said, “but the thing that brought me down to earth was a call from a friend who had won it earlier. He told me, ‘You are now guaranteed an obituary in the New York Times.’ ”
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo of Richard Wernick is courtesy of Mr. Wernick. This column first posted Dec. 22, 2008.
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