Program Notes for 9/12 Concert

 

This reading material exists to be consumed as you listen to the music of Evan Tucker. Please do not read this while other people are performing. as that is impolite, and while we are all tempted every day of our lives to be rude, it does not become one to add to the obnoxiousness of a world in which the cyberbullying of instagram and twitter already seems impossible to imagine without. So please only read this while you are listening to Mr. Tucker's music, and please only read the program past this point if you find yourself bored and/or confused. If you are intrigued by Mr. Tucker's music, you may stop reading right now....

.....Alright, now that you are bored with his music (And fie on you! Shame and p'shaw!) let us confide in you, dear un-attentive listener, the truth of the matter, which is that like all musicians, Mr. Tucker is highly self-conscious about presenting his music to you. The truth is that, as is evidenced by the fact that you are still reading, he is a composer of comically small talent, working his few native musical neurons into overdrive once a week to mine the kingdom of music for a manner in which he may allow himself participance within it. His distinction as a violinist and singer is only by the particularity of his mediocrity. While he certainly isn't talentless, his talent is absolutely not of the Mozartian or Adesian variety through which infinite facility manifests itself in all musical spheres. Mr. Tucker's talent is, rather, of the opposite variety, a certain low musical cunning forged through decades of hardscrabble life on the musical streets (staffs?).

He is thirty-eight years old, but some people, like Evan Tucker or Paul Giamatti, look fifty three by the time they are twenty, and simply look more fifty-three every year. He is from Baltimore, inescapably and proudly Jewish by cultural extraction, and more regretfully Jewish by religious practice. He is clearly no more a professional musician than he is sane, which is to say, by traditional metric he is clearly neither, but if one squints and interprets charitably, his particular insanity and amateurishness may allow him illumination into certain qualities of music unknowable to those blessed with thought processes more reasonable. 

His ability to perceive into music is not necessarily even born of talent. It is born of passion qua musical obsession, a talent born of musical memory, enabled by an endowment of perfect pitch so absolute that if you play him an eleven note chord, he can identify the missing twelfth note. And therefore a musical memory so ductile it illuminates to his ears a radio of music which, insofar as he can remember, has not shut off for five minutes since roughly 1986. So therefore as clergy were called to serve god, so too Mr. Tucker was called to serve music, and Mr. Tucker can afford such immodest mission statements because he has done so much to squander that calling except to serve music in that sadomasochistic, exploitatively co-dependent way in which in which Salieris who wish nothing more than a life of unblemished musical devotion are constantly reminded of their own failures to meet their aspirations. 

Failures indeed. This composer is not only an adult possessed of extreme absolute pitch, but a child who was harmonizing songs on the piano at four without a single lesson, whom by eight or nine could have probably written out dozens of orchestral scores in piano reduction, and as an adult write a reasonably decent facsimile of a vast plurality of standard classical repertoire in full score, plus quite a bit of more obscure music, early, modern, and classico/romantic. Who from the earliest age was reading at comprehension levels past all but the most gifted high school students, and still possesses a mental database of text, historical dates, places, and names that come to him with instant neurological availability (though, perhaps relievingly, the vicissitudes of age have begun its ascent to wear down what once was an agonizingly impenetrable fortress of memory). And all through it, he was barely ever directed, discovering it all on the engine of his own native curiosity (or perhaps his native pretension, for from the earliest age he was a knowitall little shit...). 

So yes, failures indeed. It's not that he finds his own music bad, though he hears it suffused with that touch of orotund bombast present in all he does; but while all the other composers and musicians on this concert have veritable Roman legions of music degrees, grants, awards, scholarships, reviews glowing and negative, connections made with peers, a great society of musical esteem and competition, Mr. Tucker has but a single musical degree he amply does not deserve. Any music-harmonic terminology which he successfully learned, he learned as a very small child, and any further technical terms thereafter of form, harmony, counterpoint, seemed somehow beyond his capacity for memorization after years of attempts. He only truly learned music software after two years of attempts, and it still takes him a month or many more at a time to learn how to implement any technique on software more advanced than rudimentary. 

As for the organization required to mount performances of his own music, how possible was that for a guy who could not learn to tie his shoes until he was ten years old, who has not learned any mathematics past the algebra he apparently also mastered when he was three, who would certainly have failed out of both high school and middle school but for full time parental help, and who now has the capacity at thirty-eight for organization, time management, and spatial reasoning, which is roughly at the developmental stage of a small child. 

So so too is learning, comprehending, and writing music as other musicians understand it impossible, or at very least next-to-impossible, the comprehension of whcih his own personal musical encyclopedia should have rendered irrelevant to any music program who ever took five minutes to realize that they were dealing with an incompetent of a completely unique variety which in the long term could potentially have been of great benefit to them as well as him.

In this cold universe of absolute zero cosmic sympathy, there surely must be a God, for only a supernatural force could render agony so exquisite that the person who apparently once was Evan Tucker, told from first consciousness that he was a kind of magical changeling whose intelligence could alter the curvature of the Earth's orbit, is in fact a person of the most profound impairments and disabilities. Told from the earliest age that he was and would be the smartest person anyone had ever met, and simultaneously told soon thereafter that he was also the dumbest, and would remain so for the rest of his life. Sentenced at birth to a life of imprisonment within a brain of encyclopedically wide and deep comprehension, and no ability to demonstrate it within any classroom or work setting yet structured. A life story demarcated from its beginning to its present with dog-eared pages for incidents of yet another in a voluminous series of mental breakdown marking the end of every attempt he ever made to succeed within a traditional classroom, a traditional job, a traditional relationship, a traditional set of responsibilities, and within the husk left of this brain the world once told him was so magnificent is a mind beset by its own delusions, not only of grandeur, but of apparitions and voices, of distant disturbed memories which are likely false indeed, of paranoia and dread, of unpreventable hand tremors and facial tics, of panic attacks and inability to do anything but sit for days at a time, of a former adolscent life of frequently violent external rage and constant internal storms of flash flooded tears and gale forced panic attacks, and therefore provoking in him what he prays is the ultimate delusion, that one day the delusions shall claim him from reality permanently, and therefore that the omnipresent living terror that still hounds and haunts every hour of most days, the terror he can only drown out through music and books and culture, is no delusion at all, but rather the true world, and therefore that all appearances to him of any security in his life for himself are the true delusion. 

He could give many, many, many more details of the specific instances of his failures, or perhaps he ought tell of the world's failures toward him, but the world is currently so beset by failure on all sides that what matter either Mr. Tucker's failures or the world's its failures toward his necessities more than any other?  

And so in this era of omnipresent trial and tribulation, the difficulties of any one specific life is so increasingly shared an experience it needn't elaboration even from those in positions of deep expertise within the kingdom of affliction. 

"In much wisdom, there is much grief, and he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." writeth the poet of Ecclesiastes, said to be King Solomon but probably just some Ancient Israeli hipster secretly sleeping in his maker space so he wouldn't have to pay a second rent. This concert is about musicians overcoming adversity. Mr. Tucker truly doesn't know if he has overcome anything at all except to say that at 38 going on 80, he is most certainly still with us and has every intention of being so until he's at least 78 going on 120.

What he has done is create, within these flames of life perdition, a small, relatively safe space, in which he can find the few embers of musical voice within him that the world has provided the technology for him to access. The great Evan Tucker, as I'm sure his overwroughtly grandiloquent prose telegraphs by now, does not truly exist in your universe. He is, or at least his music is, an holographic apparition from a parallel universe, perhaps even a parallel Twenty-First century; or perhaps he's merely a bizarre admixture of nineteenth and the twenty-third centuries, creating music in which a seemingly useless database of music's entire history, and perhaps even the history of the arts itself, perhaps even history itself, can only be accessed by technology just barely yet invented, procured at shamefully heavy expense whose bill he can only depend upon his uncomprehending but indulgent and thankfully upper-middle-class family, technology so incubatory that his engineer sometimes literally invents it (patent pending...), technology which more talented musicians have thankfully not thought yet to use because so difficult is the process of learning that only a fully trained engineer could endow with assemblant form, and only a person with no capability of understanding its process would be unbound by thoughts of what is and is not feasible. 

Mr. Tucker jokingly refers to Mat Leffler-Schulman, his magician of an engineer, as 'the bottom half of my musical centipede.' But that insulting description is entirely meant in self-deprecation, not of him. It is a reflection of the incompetent and vague crap which Mr. Tucker provides Mr. Leffler-Shulman that must be digested into sound. For all Mr. Tucker knows, Mat is a divine being, capable of rendering for the first time, some semblance of sound to the ideas of musical possibility which Mr. Tucker held in his head for decades with no physical form. 

'Talent' is, of course, the world's most loaded word. Some would say it is in the eye of the beholder, Boston musical legend Gunther Schuller would say that what seems like talent is the hard work that mines what is only the potential for talent. But Mr. Tucker has well over enough useless musical erudition to realize that by any metric, he has little talent at all, just musical ideas, musical memory, perhaps, dare he even say, musical wisdom. His talent as a musician is not as a player, and not necessarily as a composer. But there is one facet of musical ability for which he refuses to be at all modest. He is, without any doubt in the world, the greatest American listener to classical music of his generation: a truly dubious distinction, since he seems to be the only American of his generation who passionately listens to classical music. If classical music is about to die in America, then he can for a time be its living memory, with tens of thousands of hours of music to which his mind can reach for with instant recall, like a musical Library of Babel. And yet there is barely a single American peer of his age group with whom he can discuss this eternal obsession. To accumulate friends at all, he had to use his freakish talent for erudition to read and listen up on a dozen other subjects, upon some of which he wonders why he bothered at all. But upon classical music, he never, not once for a day, lost his fascination. 

It is perhaps this dichotomy between super-rationality and super-irrationality which has defined the twin polls of Mr. Tucker's entire life. Try as he has mightily to quiet it down, never has his mind known more than a few minutes rest, an engine which, when not teaching itself to perceive things correctly, cannot seem to help but perceive with the most extreme falsity. And it is this combination of extreme, manically rational and correct comprehension, and just extreme and tormentable errors of comprehension, that can for a time create what he hopes is a unique expressive voice and perspective upon the arts. 

Perhaps as Borges became a unique writer through constant reading, Mr. Tucker has become a unique compositional voice through constant obsessive listening, through learning the music of both composers and performers of every era, stored in a seemingly infinite memory, and an ability to compare scores in his head for hidden influences, endows him with a unique, and dare he say, perhaps a new perspective of viewing the possibilities of what music can express (and only perhaps of course....). Most people learn music by analyzing scores, but Mr. Tucker has been analyzing scores in his head for thirty years, which he (at least until his brain began to age) sees every note in his head infallibly, and could probably write out pretty goddamn decent  score reproductions of thousands of hours of music without having to look at the score. 

But through the traditional means of music, he has never had any particular gift. His violin playing is of distinction only in the extraordinariness of its mediocrity, a mediocrity he has never been able to will himself to remedy through regular practice. His voice, complemented in his adolescent and college years as potentially operatic, was by and large blown out from a college diet of binge drinking, cigarettes, and acid reflux from 5000 calorie meals (Mr. Tucker seems as though he cannot help but be extreme in all actions). His traditional compositions were not terrible if he does say so himself, though not of any deep distinction, but they required constant herculean effort for a person of deep learning disabilities. The one live performance he ever managed to organize, of a pretty good piece for four solo celli..., was such an organizational disaster that he was unable to organize all four cellists to be in the same room for a single rehearsal except one at which he could not attend himself. His recording of the performance was promptly to the ether of a broken cellphone. And the night of the performance ended the same night as the breakup of his first relationship, in his thirties no less, and a deeply unpleasant relationship of limited shelf life at that. 

This organizational experience, an experience like those in Mr. Tucker's life we generally refer to as 'Tuesday', so soured him upon mounting live performances of his own music that he swore he was done with live compositional performance forever, and possibly forever with live performance itself. 

All left to him in this eventuality was the studio, and the chance to create a completely different kind of music. One at very least as un-notated and spontaneous as jazz and rock, and hopefully of a different kind of compositional heft and musical substance than to any music of which he'd ever heard, of which he's obviously heard quite much. 

It all came to him in a moment of delusion, one of his many many, when he realized that to truly be worthy of a god who formed his mind to circumstances of such excruciatingly savage absurdity, he ought try singing the praises of this being he sometimes so loathes, and set all 150 of the long since unmusicked songs of the Bible's musical text. 

Composers have set psalms from the beginning of notated music. Some settings are quite revelatory, some quite dull. But never, so far as he knows, was there an attempt to set the Psalms of David, or any extensive tract of the Bible, in a manner that replicated the Jewish conception of God, a being with no corporeal form - its essence unreplicable, its physicality non-extant, its essence simultaneously permanent and ephemeral, music reaching out as far as an undistinguished mortal can reach into the World of No End (or the Ein Sof in Hebrew, which is a Kaballistic term literally meaning 'no end' and conceptually referring to the divine infinity). 

In spite of all these delusions of grandeur, delusions which he prays you excuse as the workings of a mind who'd known so little peace trying to find a justification to keep buggering on in spite of all terrors, he did not go into it seeking to impose any sort of giant conception on these pieces, but rather, the chance serendipity of when some of these pieces were set seemed to dictate the content to him. 2016 was the year when Mr. Tucker began to set the Psalms, and 2016 was the year when the world changed irrevocably. In mid-201,6 as Mr. Tucker was "composing" the famous text of Psalm 2 and still trying to understand the full range of musical options now available to him, it struck him with fortuitousness all too eerie that just as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin seemed poised to inherit the earth, Mr. Tucker was beset with occasion to add a musical interpretation to a line like "The Kings of the Earth rise up and the rulers take counsel together", or a line like "Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel" just as we all began to fear that a President Trump would be an agent of America's permanent destruction.

But the animating idea of these Psalm settings (insofar as there is any at all...) is, to put it in the most generalized terms - pretentious even for this program note, is to simultaneously present the listener a conception of how vast creation seems by all appearances in this world to be, and also represent the diverse multiplicity of the universe's smallnesses. The luxury of having so much text and time (for surely this is a lifetime project if it is even remotely able to be completed), is that there is ample space within to display the Universe of No End, and also those very small, trivial, finite experiences within our endless universe. In Psalms 2, 9, and 17, there are moments at which literally hundreds of recorded tracks collage with themselves, talking to one another yet speaking independently over each other - perhaps in a manner like how the divine would view hear our world and universe, or perhaps the way any group of Jews generally talks to one another.... And yet in Psalm 14, they've created a collage of 50 of the worst pop songs Mr. Tucker could possibly think of - it's not at all a statement against all forms of popular music, much of which he loves, likes, and sometimes knows very much, but he does suppose he had a slightly malicious statement in mind about how destructive the whole ethos of pop music can be: the text includes the line 'there are none that in the world that doeth good, no, not one!' Obviously, even if the Psalmist be King David himself or still another Canaanite emocore with sleeve tattoos, it was meant as a figure of speech and a cry of despair - a cry not dissimilar to his own. Mr. Tucker may be a classical music lover non-pareil, but he has spent such little professional life as he ever had accompanying guitarists in hundreds if not thousands of renditions of Wonderwall and Wagon Wheel in lame attempts to earn spending money and friends  - doing liver damage while playing in bands, conducting amateur choirs, sometimes even Jewish ones, where the singers insisted on singing nothing more substantial than the Jewish equivalent to Christian rock, and having nothing to show for his musical efforts except having sold out for all too few bucks and distracting him from any kind of musical experience that gave him any lasting satisfaction. 

But the Psalm he most truly loves is the most intimate one, #8, just him singing as simply and awkwardly as he hopes the Psalmist's audience did as they walked away from those performances of antiquity. But while the Psalmist had his psaltry and harp, his instrument is Mr. Leffler-Schulman's computerized fields of distortion, which help him to paint the words and tones and give them far greater meaning than his voice could alone. He thinks the piece is moving, it's funny, it's certainly strange, but it also is comprised of very traditional harmonies and melodies, and ultimately, he daresay, he think it's kind of beautiful - or at least he experiences beauty when he listens. This Psalm is, writ small, the spirit he wanted to bring to the whole project, and at least this time, he succeeded. 

On the other hand, Psalm 13 is, objectively speaking, the achievement of which he's almost certainly proudest. It begins with just about the most transgressive thing a Jewish composer can do - a clip of Hitler. He doesn't know precisely what statement against antisemitism he wanted to make in this work, but he does know that when he reads the Psalm, so despairing were these lines that he felt unworthy to project his own sorrow into them, for lines of such despair and rage, the cry of the world must make itself heard: 

"How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord, for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?/How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?/Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;/Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved." 

And so Mr. Tucker decided that this is the Psalm where we indict the great antisemites of modern history: Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Richard Nixon, Oswald Mosley, Father Coughlin, Louis Farrakhan, Jeremy Corbyn, Ted Cruz, John Mearsheimer, Mel Gibson, and yes, Donald Trump, with all their recorded statements against Jews in sometimes vaguely coded language, in against a backdrop of Modest Mussorgsky's wonderful setting in Pictures at an Exhibition called 'Two Jews', which is all the more brilliant, funny, and beautiful a piece of music for being so profoundly antisemitic (and in great art, the two are never mutually exclusive....), and Wagner's musical portrayal in Das Rheingold of the Nibelungen race, so close to the archetypal Jews of mythology: slaves to Gold, living in hell-like bowels of the Earth, for whom the only proper place is cowering in terror before power. Very little in either Psalm 13 or 14 is original music, it is collages of other people's music, some of that music toweringly great, some comically abominable, for Mr. Tucker is not always a composer of the most original invention but rather sometimes an encyclopedic synthesizer and arranger who just happened to notice that both of these antisemitic portrayals are in the same key of B-flat Minor. Along with it are clips from all sorts of comic portrayals of Jews on film and TV: from Seinfeld, from The Producers, from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fran Drescher, Don Rickles, and yes, Woody Allen too, and for whom the worst you could say of any of them is that these people are sometimes repellent, and perhaps deeply so, but no more deeply than those of other faiths, and yet Jews they are so hardly ever mass murderers, and whatever crimes Jews have committed, it is patently absurd even unto the present day to ever draw moral equivalence between what any Jews in history or current events have done and all which was done to them. And yet all through the ages, it is always done. And all throughout the second and third (final) section, one soprano glissando stretched to five minutes length, and when it ends, the screams of the Nibelungen sound from the Solti Ring recording, which have always sounded to him like the screams of children in the camps. As his best childhood friend said to him, an Israeli by birth: 'Thank you for giving my nightmares a soundtrack."

As for Psalm 11, that was their triumphant return to the studio after having to shelf the project for a year while Mr. Leffler-Schulman had to go abroad after some misfortunes. They'd arrived back and resumed, and the project completely changed. Some of the earlier psalm settings are, in retrospect, grandiloquent, deliberately elephantine, vast, deafeningly loud, perhaps a little too uncompromisingly modernist. But Psalm 11 is song length, with a beginning, middle, and end, and a melody so light it could (nearly....) be pop-song. It was a new concision, a new consonance, a new appeal which it largely had not occurred to Mr. Tucker yet to attempt. 

While they must get through a giant mountain of epics like Psalms 18, 22, and 25, he would imagine, he would hope, that the larger future of the Psalm project will be closer to the strange intimacy of works like Psalms 8 and 11 than to a Psalm like 13. Importantitis kills so many artistic projects in their inception, and it is both amazing to Mr. Tucker that the project continues apace in Year 5, yet also astounding that they've still only gotten to Psalm 18 (a 51-line Psalm about death and rebirth in which Mr. Tucker intends to incorporate the sounds of coronavirus). If they continue at this pace, they should be done by somewhere between year 50 and 55, when Mr. Tucker is roughly 85 and Mr. Leffler-Schulman is roughly 90. Perhaps (and only perhaps) these works sometimes succeed in making larger statements because their composer has earned some small right to make gestures of such pomp through decades of struggle without such pomposity seeming completely absurd (again, only perhaps....), or perhaps they succeed because Mr. Tucker is composing in the only way he's ever truly learned how, and simply follows his pathetically inattentive daemon wherever it leads him. 

But in the meantime, Mr. Tucker is rather proud of this project. He would prefer to write much more, he would also prefer that his learning disabilities, emotional agonies, and life history evaporate into uncapturable mist, and he were able to start his life over again completely from scratch. Some life conditions are unable to alter, and these works are, let us pray, just the first tenth of leavings from a life that was thus far mislived, mishandled, misplanned, so well acquainted with grief and so briefly acquainted with joy. 

He thanks you for your courtesy, your ears, your eyes, and he most certainly and particularly thanks the Great Sarah Bob, who has somehow plucked him from a complete and ignominious obscurity to be a featured composer, and to Shiela Gallagher, whom to his amazement has saw fit unprompted by any request from him to give his music a visual, cinematic dimension of which he has long dreamed. A blessing upon the houses of both, and may they, may you, may we all, stay safe in this bizarre era of death and let us pray soon, rebirth. 

Amen.