WAR SONATAS
Michael Kieran Harvey
Move Records MD 3477
Behind these three piano sonatas, Michael Kieran Harvey centres on some major crises of our age which are essentially colossal failures of action and inaction. The works operate in ways that are unfamiliar to those of us reared on the conflict portraits of Shostakovich, Nono, Penderecki and Britten; all four masters have compositions to their names that memorialize acts or states of warfare, scores that present emotional and intellectual challenges. Still, as we’re concerned with music, the underpinning principles (or lack of them) involved remain tacit as far as further elaboration is concerned.
Harvey’s Sonata No. 8 bears the title P. Singer, referring to the Australian philosopher to whom the composer is highly indebted for his findings on ethical behaviour and our treatment of the animal world. Much of the teaching of Singer would be familiar to anyone aware of his work with the Greens and his public statements while vying for parliamentary office. Can you present bio-ethical argument in musical form? Probably not but Harvey presents us with a powerful, lopsided sonata with a massive first movement and two much briefer addenda.
Actually, this emphasis on initial dissertations at some length obtains in the following two sonatas. the second entitled Sonata da Caemmerer refers to Harvey’s long-time colleague and friend Arjun von Caemmerer, while also having a bit of word play with the sonata da camera form, even if the most willing of us find it hard to figure out workable comparisons. Its opening Zappaesque lasts as long as the following Rubato and Giusto tempo combined. For Sonata No. 10, you can see the title reference on the CD cover above: Riding with Death. Leonardo’s illustration shows Envy riding on a casket, and I’m assuming that this concerns a different type of dissertation from the previous two personally dedicated sonatas as Harvey is concerned here with AI and its pernicious character in generating weapons used in conflicts across our world today. Here, the first movement lasts a little over fifteen minutes, its lone successor a little less than seven.
Apart from this tenth sonata’s monitory message against giving in to the machines, what have the other works to do that they fall under the War umbrella? The answer is to do with their environment rather than any imitation of the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle. Harvey sees these three works as a triptych and it is unavoidable that you seek common elements in all of them, even if many of these are simply part-and-parcel of the composer’s compositional arsenal. They were all completed in a stretch of 19-20 months across 2022 and 2023, a time which saw a massive escalation in the war initiated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and at its end saw the opening of the Israel-Gaza conflict which has itself become an Old Testament-inspired annihilation. Despite Singer’s anti-Vietnam War stance, you have to stretch mentally to find resonances between that time so full of righteous protest and today’s oscillation of sympathies, compounded by the overtly destructive policies of Putin and Trump and the diplomatic flip-flops from leaders you ought to be able to trust.
In the second of these works, saluting von Caemmerer, the relationship with war comes from the empathy both Harvey and his colleague find in facing the soul-destroying realities of today’s partisanships and the disillusionment that every day produces as the sides in both conflicts become even more imbalanced and any trust in diplomacy proves hollow. Of the three parts to this triptych, this work presents as the least troubled, although that could be just a superficial judgement about its feisty rhythmic jaunts.
Certainly, the most enigmatic is the Riding with Death two-movement construct in which Harvey presents eight Hallucinations for a first movement – reductions to nightmarish scenarios where we waver against artificial intelligence while it weaves its multiple webs of influence and confusion. This is another large-scale essay, or series of paragraphs in which the activity level oscillates between slow angularity and fierce vitality. In the sonata’s second phase, less than half the length of the first, the lessening of humanity is entrenched, leading to a set of final pages where the aural onslaught is overwhelming as we surrender all power to mechanisms that pound us into nothingness – or worse, irrelevance.
The Singer sonata opens with an assertive Allegro giusto that emphasizes athletic leaps, and a motif consisting of a repeated note that accretes companions in an upward or downward-heading flourish, given in both hands. And abruptly, we are in the middle of a Harvey 4/4 mesh of semiquavers, syncopated accents, brief motifs, and an ardently driven energy. Relief comes in a rubato interlude that sees sustained chords wrapped in decorative foliage, the whole leading to a Lisztian climax of epic virtuosity before we return to the giusto and that obsessive wide-ranging percussiveness of the opening.
Another interlude, an A piacere, interrupts a plethora of sextuplets operating at cross-purposes before the composer presents a new chain of atmospheres by way of holding down unstruck chords with one hand and bringing their strings into voice by hammering out abrupt explosions in the other. Eventually we come to a dramatic triple forte climax and a statement of the dedicatee’s surname in complex soft chords; don’t ask me what notes represent S, I, N and R. For good measure, Harvey also gives us Singer’s name backwards in chords that largely have the same components as the originals.
A reversion to the giusto vehement drive, another dramatic a piacere and a series of fortissimo and pianissimo juxtapositions, and the movement ends on a final statement of the single-note-plus-accretions motif leading to a final bass chord of two discordant fourths. What’s next to do but propose a brief Onirico interlude, an unsettled dream that features gruff bass gruppetti and ornate right-hand arabesques while the substance lies in a chain of hefty ten-note sustained chords, the whole dissolving into a five-bar Liberamente excursion prior to folding into the final Ritmico pages.
This finale comprises six permutations and I can see some transferences between two of them but it’s probably best viewed as a set of discrete scenes that offer wide variations in rhythm and harmonic density. Which is not saying much when you look back over the rest of the sonata even if, as in this final movement, the oasis passages blend into the architecture so that the score sounds like a tapestry with consistent threads, brought together at the end by a vital restatement of the fixed-note-with-additions leitmotif.
Harvey begins his Caemmerer score with two identical bars of four double-dotted crotchets in 7/4 time, not wasting his time about submerging this simple material in syncopated cross-measures throughout a movement indebted to one of the composer’s inspirations: Frank Zappa. Disjunction is the game in play here as hefty accents bounce across the frenetic action that finds the executant oscillating between bars with irregular numbers of semiquavers so that you can’t settle into a regular toe-tapping pulse. But then you never can with Harvey who delights in establishing a rhythm that you think is formulaic but which turns out to be deceptive, the accent not where you thought it would be.
Without pause, the score moves into its second phase, Rubato, which proffers a limited meditation on the work’s opening four notes – or perhaps not. This is another set of pages that moves into lavish sound-washes that become more ornate after the movement’s staid, Satie-like opening. The splashes of sound are woven around sustained chords of remarkable complexity that build on the placid sequence initially articulated, before a small transition of about 20 bars Meno mosso breaks open the concluding Giusto tempo set in one of the composer’s most taxing rhythms: 11/16.
You hurtle here from climax through highpoint to explosion, one after another in a powerful exhibition of virtuosity which somehow emphasizes Harvey’s boundless energetic high spirits. You can recognize striding octave bass patterns that transfer to the right hand, punchy block-chords that call and respond across the instrument, hugger-mugger at-the-octave parallel passages like the most taxing five-finger exercises. The composer is here at his most ebullient, giving us some kind of representation of his friendship with von Caemmerer in a sparkling toccata that finally dwindles after a chain of dyads enjoy a diminuendo – as though the dialogue is paused, not ended.
While the first two sonatas in this sequence have been humanized by their dedicatees, the last moves into the realm of a cerebral conflict between AI and its creators. Across the first movement, Harvey offers eight scenarios, states where humans think they are in control. These vary markedly in activity level; a deftly outlined linear argument is followed by an initially calm state that is subjected to pinpricks of doubt or harassment. One of these hallucinations speaks with an updated Webernian angularity while another offers an initial calm underpinned by nervous semiquaver chains that eventually coerce the upper chords into a mirroring rapid angst.
Finally, we arrive at Hammered, relentless which offers a barrage of semiquaver chords in alternating hands with gruff chords as pivots. Harvey is wise enough, even in his anger, to vary the diet with abrupt changes of register and dynamic, not to mention those improbable time signatures that sweep your security blanket away. After some relieving pages in the more fluid ambience of triplets, the opening growling bass recurs and drives the forward motion into a maelstrom of strident chords that grow from seven, through nine to a concluding welter of insistent twelve note chords hammered martellato to an abrupt ending where the human is subsumed in the automaton.
In the end, Harvey’s latest sonatas don’t take war as their subject even if you hear emphatic bursts of energy that speak of turmoil and the suffering that large-scale conflicts bring about. More, the scores have been generated in tempore belli, a grim state that we have been inhabiting for some years, even insulated as we are in this place from the worst of its evils. The composer has been fortunate enough to find a framework for his considerations of these times in the species-broad altruism of Singer, and to hone his aesthetic in van Cammaerer’s friendship and collaboration. In the end, he faces us with the potential for inhumanity in AI and its assumption of authority. But, thanks to the brave agitation and fearlessness of his music, we can follow the best stoic directive and say not the struggle naught availeth.
O'Connell the Music 