They didn’t all sit around a table, participate in a “conference call” via telephone, or meet in an Internet “chat room.” Bruce Brubaker has not exchanged ideas in person with each of the individuals whose words appear below, nor could he have. Certainly, each of these artists—musicians, sociologists, composers, literary theorists, musicologists, critics, and philosophers— speaks their own words, a few in translation.

Bruce Brubaker. (Photo by Nan Melville)

Bruce Brubaker: Five Juilliard students will step onto the Alice Tully Hall stage on October 23 and begin the annual Irene Diamond Concert with a performance of Stravinsky’s Pastorale, in an arrangement for violin and wind quartet. The piece might seem to evoke a memory of a past musical language, in service of some carefully controlled expressive ritual.

Richard Taruskin: The neoclassical repertory…was an intransigent thing…it was a tendentious journey back to where we had never been.

Brubaker: …just like all kinds of searches for “authenticity.” In any time, the values and aesthetic concerns of the present are mostly responsible for artistic expressions or conclusions.

Jean Baudrillard: America is the original version of modernity…America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity…it lives in a perpetual present.

		Source materials for some of the text in this article. List of Participants

Brubaker: A concert program (or a CD) is a context in which to hear music. All kinds of connections and interrelationships may be exposed, or concealed. For the Diamond Concert, I commissioned two short pieces by Juilliard student composers, Music in Transition by Nico Muhly and All the Ends of the World by Kati Agocs. These new works will serve almost as “modulations” between the larger compositions on the program. Much in the way early piano recitalists extemporized harmonic transitions between pieces in a recital, this new music will stylistically and conceptually bridge works by Philip Glass, Haydn, and Brahms. Listeners may “remember” aspects of this concert in ways they might not otherwise. The concert is, if you will, a hypertext.

George Landow and Paul Delany: A hypertext can be composed, and read, non-sequentially; it is a variable structure, composed of blocks of text (or what Roland Barthes terms lexia)... Although conventional reading habits apply within each block, once one starts to follow links from one block to another new rules and new experience apply.

Brubaker: In a concert, music exists in time. Grouped together, Stravinsky’s Pastorale, the Haydn sonata I’ll be playing (Hoboken XVI:39), and Brahms’s C-Minor Piano Quartet, which will come after intermission, seem to share motivic material and trace a continuing overall harmonic shape.

Landow and Delany: Hypertext breaks down our habitual way of understanding and experiencing texts… It can also provide a revelation, by making visible and explicit mental processes that have always been part of the total experience… The text as the reader imagined it—as opposed to the physical text objectified in the book—never had to be linear, bounded, or fixed. A reader could jump to the last page to see how the story ended; could think of relevant passages in other works; could re-order texts by cutting and pasting…

Brubaker: We hear music in the present tense, but in one sense the performance represents the transference of musical patterns, structure, and expression into the memory of the listener. It is recorded there no less certainly than in a musical score the performer may have read from during the performance.

Bill Viola: When I edited a tape with the computer, for the first time in my life I saw that my video piece had a “score,” a structure, a pattern that could be written out on paper. We view video and film in the present tense—we “see” one frame at a time passing before us in this moment. We don’t see what is before it and what is after it—we only see the narrow slit of “now.” Later, when the lights come on, it’s gone. The pattern does exist, of course, but only in our memory.

Brubaker: Music is memory. And without memory, no music is possible.

Paul Hindemith: Reactions to music, however, may change as fast as musical phrases do; they may spring up in full intensity at any given moment and disappear entirely when the musical pattern that provoked them ends or changes… The reactions music evokes are not feelings; they are the images, the memories of feelings.

John Rahn: The married couple who value what they affectionately refer to as “our song” because of its personal associations with a period in their history… have learned to love the song, beyond their initial aesthetic reaction to it… The immigrant, or exile, living in a foreign land, may use the folk music of his homeland to focus and contain his nostalgia... The powerful and deep emotions evoked may well spill over into the aesthetic domain, investing the music with beauty of a kind not pertinent to it in the old country.

Brubaker: At the Diamond Concert, I’ll play a short piano piece by Philip Glass before a performance of his Fourth String Quartet. (Glass studied at Juilliard.) The piano piece, Metamorphosis Two, is drawn from music written for Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988). The film includes recurring stylized reenactments of a murder, always accompanied by this music by Glass. The outwardly rather placid music becomes so identified with the grizzly event that we come to dread each new hearing of it in the film.

Hindemith: Real feelings need a certain interval of time to develop, reach their climax, and fade again.

Brubaker: Sometimes, sitting backstage before a concert, I recollect the circumstances of my previous performances of a piece…

Viola: It is only very recently that the ability to forget has become a prized skill…

Brubaker: Johannes Brahms wrote many pieces that “remember” Beethoven. Pieces that borrow from (the F-Major Cello Sonata’s slow movement originates in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 2, No. 2), explain (Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 6, comments on the slow movement from Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 10, No. 3), or even “forge” (the last movement of Brahms’s D-Minor Piano Concerto counterfeits the last movement of Beethoven’s Third Concerto) specific pieces by that earlier B. The Diamond Concert is going to conclude with a performance of Brahms’s C-Minor Quartet for piano and strings. The piece is a commentary on, or exegesis of, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony…

Richard Wagner: What inimitable art did Beethoven employ in his C-Minor Symphony, in order to steer his ship from the ocean of infinite yearning to the haven of fulfillment! He was able to raise the utterance of his music almost to a moral resolve, but not to speak aloud that final word…

Baudrillard: From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death.

Brubaker: In this quartet, Brahms explores Beethoven’s famous motive and the symphony’s large-scale shape. Brahms’s quartet seems to me to be filled with poignant speculations about a world—about music—after and without Beethoven.

Viola: What we call history is the notation of events in time…

Brubaker: In a musical world of discrete pitch and rhythmic possibility one can imagine gradually morphing one work into another. At what point on the continuum could Beethoven’s “Moonlight” become Stockhausen’s Klavierstück? Perhaps that’s the sort of thing the new commissioned pieces will do.

Viola: Possibly the most startling thing about our individual existence is that it is continuous. It is an unbroken thread—we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives us the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods, or sections, of certain times or “highlights”… Memory can be regarded as a filter…

Brubaker: In 1780, a collection of six sonatas for the piano by Franz Joseph Haydn was published. The sixth and last sonata printed in the group (Hoboken XVI:39) reprises a theme used in one of the earlier works. Pieces like this were played in homes, read over like novels, not scrutinized in the concert hall. Imagine an 18th-century burgher at his keyboard encountering the recycled theme and paging back to look at the earlier sonata. Haydn has constructed a physical manifestation of remembering, and a provocation to remember. In the first edition, there’s a disclaimer that says: “There are two separate pieces among these six sonatas in which some bars show the very same idea: the composer has done this on purpose for the sake of the difference in treatment.”

Franz Joseph Haydn: Of course, I could have chosen a hundred different ideas instead of this one; but so that the whole opus will not be exposed to blame on account of this one intentional detail (which the critics and especially my enemies might interpret wrongly), I thought that this avertissement or something like it must be appended…

Brubaker: Well, advertising takes many forms. I suppose this conversation itself advertises the Irene Diamond Concert.

Joseph Polisi: Yes. Annually, Juilliard presents a concert honoring Irene Diamond, who has developed significant and highly effective programs in the areas of medical research, minority education, and the arts. Each year, musicians collaborate to help Juilliard express its gratitude to Mrs. Diamond, whose personal philanthropy has funded student scholarships, faculty salaries, and special projects at The Juilliard School.

Dorothy Ridings: Irene Diamond’s philanthropy made possible one of the greatest breakthroughs in medical research since the Salk vaccine for polio.

Polisi: That was the development of protease inhibitors. Through her foundations, Mrs. Diamond has been the largest private supporters of AIDS research in the United States.

Philip Glass: My Fourth String Quartet was composed as part of a memorial concert, for the artist Brian Buczak.

Hindemith: Dreams, memories, musical reactions – all three are made of the same stuff.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good.

Brubaker: I remember doing a performance, in a loft in Soho, of John Cage’s Living Room Music (1940). It’s a work that makes use of actual instruments that are found in a living room—sofa, coffee table, books. The stage at Tully will be rather living-room-like in its arrangement. There will be seats and stands for some players, a piano, an armchair. So, the Diamond Concert will be living room music too. Chamber music after dinner, the fourth wall of the salon removed so we celebrants may be overheard.

The 10th annual Irene Diamond Concert features pianist Bruce Brubaker along with other Juilliard faculty members and students. The performance takes place on Tuesday, October 23, 2001 at 8 p.m. in Alice Tully Hall. The event is free but tickets are required and will be distributed beginning October 9.