A Student Composer in the Mainstream

Mainly because his mother, Barbara, smiles so nicely at me in the Tuesday Musicale--the amateur music group I play cello in--I went to see Mark Chatfield give his recital to qualify for his master’s degree in composition from USC School of Music. I also wanted to see what young composers are composing today; I had a horror that they might all be Philip Glass sound-alikes. I am surfeited with the publicity and the repetitious banality of Glass’ music. Was self-indulgence the music mode of the day?

We sat in the rather cavernous, ship-like Pasadena Presbyterian Church. In came a young man in a black shirt and black tie, all but running, with a dress suit on a hanger slung over his shoulder. Not enough time apparently, for after a few moments he came out again, still black-shirted, looking like a slim gangster, to sit at the piano for “The Mummies of Guanajuato,” a violoncello piano sonata with Chatfield on the cello. The piece flickered all over the cello, even up into the no man’s land below the bridge--lots of short notes, lots of harmonics, intricate music not so much sparse as well edited. Modern, not easily absorbed music, but something you would want to listen to again. William Morosi, gangster pianist, joining with sonority and dragonfly notes, flicking off the last high piano notes as if they were shimmering water drops from his fingers.

Then William Charles Beck played Chatfield’s “Three Meditations for Organ.” We saw his back as he worked the keyboards, the wooden foot-pedal bars, the ranks of white stops like porcelain kitchen-cabinet pulls on each side of the organ--leaning and reaching his body like a surfer to reach a button or key. How physically demanding it must be to play the organ, altogether different from the hatted ladies playing “Sweet Sacred Heart” in the little St. Mary’s Church in Roscommon, Michigan summertimes. At the end notes like shattered glass, strangely underlain with a deep bass throb, too slow for a heartbeat--perhaps a dinosaur’s heart.

Next a motet, “Regina Coeli,” in Latin with 10 singers (Chatfield among them), followed by a “commentary for Seven Woodwinds.” Interesting, I thought, that the tuning up of the seven had the same truncated excitement of a full orchestra--I do wish everybody would tune up longer, it’s better than a lot of modern music. Here the clarinet took a tone over from the French horn seamlessly, catching the same timbre, one of the few times I have heard the clarinet played with the clean fluidity of the horn (I might yet learn to like the clarinet).

Intermission, which saw me trying to clear my head to understand how anyone could hear, play and write such a bewildering variety of things, before Bruce Johnson, looking like a cross between Robert Redford and a young Kevin McCarthy, sang three songs for tenor.

And last, a string quartet, so complicated that a seated conductor led them, Chatfield on cello midway hissing to him, “Faster! You’re slowing it down.” “To a Beach,” one of the movements, not only investigated all those sounds on the other side of the string players’ bridges (like seeing the other side of the moon)--bowing with the wood or open strings while plucking (sometimes both hands)--but all those sounds an ocean makes on the beach. It reminded me of early Monday Evening Concerts (which used to be titled Monday Evening Concerts on the Roof, and I am privileged to be one of those who actually heard one on Peter Yates’ roof in Silver Lake where they all started). Some of those had way-out sounds--one I would rather not remember featured drumsticks against flowerpots--and you would leave mentally shouting, “Oh boy!” or “Ye gods!”

Chatfield’s quartet had sounds deliberately scratchy, like small animals scurrying: shrieks, jerks, bumps, gasps. No, he’s not going to . . . yes, he does turn down the C peg--I was waiting for it, nothing like that to make life a bit more difficult--then turns it up again in the middle of a passage. But “Oh boy!” was ringing through my mind because these notes and effects were thought out, carefully put in their complicated order--self-edited, I say again. It ended with whushing ocean sounds diminishing to little laps against the sand--not cute, but convincing.

“People came,” Chatfield exclaimed at the reception, throwing up his hands in endearing surprise. Well, not many. I don’t think there were more than 20 of us who were not relatives, family friends or performers, for as the recital went on, audience members rose to take their turn on the stage.

Chatfield, 32, is hoping to make his living in music, but of love and necessity is swim coach at Beverly Hills High School; he swam in the 1972 Olympics at Munich. He is a good swimmer; I think he can surge upstream against the odds and be one of the leaders in the mainstream of American music.