Elodie Lauten’s first two albums have been repackaged with rarities as Piano Works Revisited. One review judges the tracks that originally made up Lauten’s debut unsophisticated and underdeveloped. But the mood conjured by Lauten’s juvenilia is interesting in itself, prompting the same reviewer to recall early-80s New York: its high crime rate, dirty streets, and scuzzy art movements. Lauten’s own website cites Village Voice from 1983 on Piano Works: “I was sitting somewhere in a dangerous world, wondering what would happen to the girl at the piano… She changed my mind with mantras that shifted slowly from one troubled mood to the next, the new one only slightly — but subtly — different from the last.”
Personally, I find Lauten’s “baby photos” — as the first reviewer called the short hypnotic tracks on Piano Works — pleasantly accessible and repetitive enough for any short attention span to handle. I defer to the learned commentaries of Lauten herself and her educated reviewers for technical detail on her full blown career. That she began composing in more humble circumstances is what I am most attracted to. In my opinion, her nascent post-minimalism forms its cyclical structures not on the basis of the looped whispering background tracks, but on the repetitive, percussive potentialities of the piano itself. In a live setting, the piano’s pleasantly authoritative tonal consistency can convince one that it’s a kind of ‘standard’ for all sound. But I’ve always found it interesting when recordings of the piano reveal that it does not possess a voice of its own in the same way as open string and wind instruments do. Arguably, it is an instrument that expresses emotion/change through a combination of melodic phrasing and a rhythm and harmonic section ruled by the left hand.
It is interesting then to consider Lauten’s career trajectory with this in mind — begin with a shot of the veiled girl at her piano (publicity for a performance of Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Memory) and trace it to the extreme sonic geekery of her blog for Sequenza21/. Lauten sometimes calls herself a microtonalist rather than a post-minimalist composer. It’s unclear whether this reflects a desire to break free of the minimalist legacy or whether Lauten considers the microtonal label a more fitting summary of musical developments influenced by minimalism. She trained with La Monte Young who taught her about Indian music, and she is interested in many of the facets of Eastern philosophy that fascinated minimalists. The range and depth of her interests and influences — assembled as a theoretical list of google tags — are an intimidating prospect. Alan Ginsberg was a friend when she came from Paris to New York, and she composed an opera, Waking in New York, based around fragments of his writing. She has also developed her own style of improvisation, Universal Mode Improvisation (UMI). Some of her more esoteric reference points include the mathematics of Kepler and Newton and Vedic cosmologies.
In general, Lauten’s intense study would suggest a reasoned response to the minimalism she encountered in her early career. Listening to Piano Works and knowing the limitations of the instrument, I wonder to what extent these parameters influenced her subsequent career. And I wonder how much more significant the microtonal movement was for pianists rather than for guitarists? Early-80s New York of course gave birth to a band called Sonic Youth. As an ignorant rock fan, I was always under the impression that their musical innovations could be summed up as ‘weird tunings.’ Obviously, before digital music technology, the process of re-tuning for keyboardists had to be more invasive and deliberate. Now, it seems much easier to mess up your instrument or just reprogram it. Has technology paradoxically made the phase shifts of minimalism more organic for keyboard players and less grounded in the formal structure of composition?
Whatever the reality for keyboardists today, the stripling compositions of Lauten cleverly achieve the running water/drone effect of minimalism by making the piano’s hyperactivity mimic passing time, all the while running this apparent complexity through repetitive cycles. In the tracks from the album Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Memory, the violin takes a more active role. The eponymous “Orchestral Memory” adopts a slow, grand pace, and in doing so dispenses with the piano. Listening to this track — which is beautiful in its way — I recognize in myself an instinctual aversion to extremely dissonant music that borders on musical xenophobia. Minimalism seems to recognize and deliberately attempt to override this impatience, treating all processes, even the geologically slow, as if they are equally likely to reach a resolution, in the worst-case scenario one presumes, referring unhappy punters to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But human beings — frail creatures that we are — do like to see things from a bird’s eye perspective and we do like to keep busy. Just slowing down the recorded human voice can cause us to make signs of the cross or reach for the holy water.
I’m not suggesting that all minimalism takes the form of ominous, atonal music, but that in principle it seems to maintain a saintly, almost inhuman patience for maddeningly irresolute processes. Piano Works Revisited is mostly pleasant to my prejudiced ears not because of some residue of untrimmed, romantic babyfat in the compositions, but because Lauten’s raw material (the piano) doesn’t move freely through alternate tunings, and so although its ideas unfold gradually, it resolves itself by means familiar to me. It simply has less opportunity to stray and to delay its inevitable resolution. If it were a canvas, Lauten’s piano on this album would be Jane Austen’s little bit of ivory (and ebony), taking root in a small patch.
Perhaps Lauten sees the future of music purely in composition that relies on tinkering with instruments and achieving far-out results (like the mystically inclined circuit-benders). But judging by “Variations on the Orange Cycle” — her “mature” work — she has benefited from working closely with the sonic limitations and the complex, percussive strengths of the piano. Strange how the pianoforte’s loud and soft was once a revelation. Now, as a relatively inflexible instrument, its appeal is almost monochrome, vintage. Perhaps this is why it’s often considered a starter instrument and why Lauten’s own debut appears precocious, even apologetic on its behalf. The later composition for solo piano, “Variations on the Orange Cycle,” is accomplished and has been rightly acclaimed. An improvisation was recorded in 1991, which was written down with impressive care to remain faithful to the spontaneous original. In the program notes, Lauten waxes lyrical on the 36 minute composition: “The theme — objective — exists not as a melody but as unchangeable fact, a reality to be accepted just as the rotation of the earth. It is the most basic musical utterance, a fundamental tone.” Lauten says she has altered the subject object/relationship of theme/variation. I’m not exactly sure what she means by this, but I recognize the reassuring bell-like ‘single tone’ and I see how it grounds the piece — conceptually in imitation of a natural physical process like the turning of an old-fashioned weathercock, but also emotionally in its relationship with the other tones accessible across the piano’s traditional layout.
Piano Works Revisited is fundamentally intellectual music, and given the subtlety of the compositions, it could hardly be otherwise. However, Lauten’s attention to structure rather than sound makes for extremely pleasant listening by conventional standards. Although I speak from a limited knowledge of her subsequent career, I think the album shows that Lauten has benefited from her confinement within the coffin-like boards of the piano, its traditional intervals, its monochrome sound. It may sound a tad Victorian to say this, but young artists often do benefit from austere apprenticeships like this.
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