Oakland’s Mills College has for decades been sacred ground for contemporary music, says Charles Amirkhanian, the artistic and executive director of San Francisco’s New Music organization Other Minds.
In an interview before the group’s two-concert PastForward series this week and April 5 (bit.ly/4iVCK26) to mark the centennial celebration of French composer Pierre Boulez and to offer pianist Geoffrey Burleson’s solo recital “From Antheil to Zappa,” Amirkhanian cites pinnacle appearances and instructors in the history of Mills College (officially renamed Mills College at Northeastern University in 2022).
At the women’s college founded in the 1850s whose website notes that it now serves all genders (mills.northeastern.edu/about), Igor Stravinsky gave his only public performance of “Sonata for Two Pianos,” Jewish composer Darius Milhaud taught composition from 1940 to 1971 after fleeing Nazi Germany and a succession of work from U.S. composers such as Dave Brubeck, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and others was developed or performed.
“Even without this history, the glory of Littlefield Concert Hall — with its murals, detailed ceiling paintings, excellent sight lines, great acoustics and extraordinary pianos — cries out for live music. It’s simply one of the best places in America to hear a piano recital,” says Amirkhanian.
The two concerts provide cohesion with piano as the unifying element in markedly contrasting and diverse programs. Pianists Gloria Cheng and Ralph van Raat will present music in the first concert Wednesday for two pianos that includes works by Boulez, Cage, Stravinsky and more.
Burleson’s “From Antheil to Zappa” on April 5, the second concert, offers frequently forgotten or overlooked mid-20th century masterpieces by American composers such as George Antheil, Norman Dello Joio, Gerald Strang, Vincent Persichetti, Mary Kouyoumdjian and Frank Zappa in Burleson’s arrangement of “Be Bop Tango.”
In a separate interview, Burleson characterizes his one previous appearance in an Other Minds festival as “intriguing, thrilling, adventuresome, free-wheeling, creative and yet highly organized.” Many of the festival’s works were performed on invented instruments, including one he played while performing composer Neil Rolnick’s 40-minute “Lockdown Fantasies,” a work for piano and laptop computer Burleson describes as “fantasmigorical.”
In his second outing, in addition to the piano as a connective thread throughout the program, the repertoire spotlights American composers who flourished in the mid-20th century but whose works today are rarely performed.
“They were trying to forge American music and used popular, jazz, hoedown and other vernacular components in these works,” Burleson says.
“Even Samuel Barber to some extent, despite some of his work being ubiquitous in concert halls, has ‘Four Excursions.’ It’s less heard and uses boogie-woogie for the first departure, blues for the second, “cowboy” music for the fourth excursion.”
About other pieces, Burleson says Antheil’s “Piano Sonata No. 2, the Airplane,” reflects the composer’s eccentricity.
“He wrote cutting-edge, boisterous music that scandalized audiences with pounding tone clusters. ‘Airplane’ was influenced by machines and futurism.
“At the same time, composers like Norman Dello Joio and Irving Fine are still connected with Baroque and classical forms. The rhythms, accents and tonality of sonatas come up with tonal chord combinations that manage to sound fresh. It’s accessible and harmonic.”
Burleson says Vincent Persichetti’s 12th piano sonata, “Mirror Sonata,” has more than one marvel within its rigorous structure.
“He was important as a teacher for 40 years at Juilliard and taught both Philip Glass and Thelonious Monk. I can’t think of any American composers who have written so many piano sonatas. In his last sonata, everything the right hand plays is mirrored by the left hand. That includes chords, melodies.
“One hand plays a melody going up; the other plays the exact same melody going down. He keeps this rigorous pattern through the whole piece, but it isn’t gimmicky. It produces variety and symmetry and new sound and approach to composition.”
Burleson says he finds the aforementioned Armenian-American composer Kouyoumdjian’s “Aghavni” (“Doves”) difficult to include in a program.
“It’s inspired by a triptych of poems taking place before, during and after the (1915) Armenian genocide. It’s emotionally devastating, singular, tragic and horrific. I often don’t want to play anything after performing it. It’s only because it ends in a quiet, transcendent, hopeful place of resilience that I can play another work after completing it.”
Burleson suggests any piece written for an ensemble and later transcribed for solo piano invites transformation.
“I’ve been a huge Zappa fan for a long time. This piece is the collision of tango form and Be Bop jazz. In live performances with Zappa’s band, they’re juxtaposed surreally. There’s also improvisation in his live shows of the ’70s and ’80s, so I have extended improvisation sections in the piece.”
The transformed version retains the incredible speed of Be Bop jazz and serves to amplify a sense of insanity, Burleson says.
“There are the crazy angular lines of be bop jazz, like in solos of Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. You find the melodies changing quickly; rising or falling, skipping up and down. If you put it on paper, it’d look like a seismology chart of an earthquake.”
Amirkhanian from Other Minds says Burleson shares a symbiotic mindset with the San Francisco group devoted to encouraging contemporary musicians and composers to enter a dialogue with each other and audiences. Coming from multiple generations and widely diverse cultures, influences, traditions, training and artistic processes, the conversations — musical and verbal — generate futuristic energy while retaining connections to music history, he says.
“It doesn’t take an expert to know that Americans wrote beautiful piano music in the period spanning the 1930s to the 1950s,” says Amirkhanian. “Geoffrey has championed many of those composers in this now-forgotten repertoire.
“When we discovered that we shared this interest, we put our heads together to devise a concert of personal favorites. The Kouyoumdjian (piece) was his idea, to his credit, and each piece I mentioned he knew about and was game to play. As a pianist, Geoffrey is brilliantly talented but also endlessly curious. I like that.”
For concert tickets and more information, visit otherminds.org/from-antheil-to-zappa online.
Lou Fancher is a freelance writer. Reach her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.