JEROME KITZKE
THE PAHA SAPA GIVE-BACK
Innova 891
1. The Green Automobile
(2000) 8:28
2. The Paha Sapa Give-Back (1993) 14:57
3. Winter
Count (2008) 37:27
--60:52--
Jennifer Kathryn Marshall
Barbara Merjan
ETHEL
The Mad Coyote
Jerome Kitzke
Jerome Kitzke:
Containing Multitudes
Jerome Kitzke
has said that he always considers himself to be as much a storyteller as a
composer, and the three pieces on this CD bear witness to that dual
nature. Composed over a fifteen-year
period, they express the power and ecstatic magic and originality of his best
work. These three pieces also reflect
the themes and concerns which have been Kitzke’s
focus from the beginning of his career: social justice and compassion, the
fundamental paradoxes of life and death, and the ability for diverse
elements---notated music, speech, improvisation, laughter, extended techniques,
ritual drumming---to not only coexist, but thrive through interaction.
Speech in Kitzke’s
music can be aligned rhythmically with the musical rhythms or can be freely
spoken. Even when the rhythms are
notated, they almost always follow the cadences of natural speech. His scores are meticulously written---unlike
most contemporary composers, who write with a computer notation system, he
draws everything but the staves by hand, giving it the human touch. For wordless sounds and other specific
emotional intentions, he creates his own graphic notation, which not only
conveys instructions to the performers but also turns his scores into works of
art (for many years the American Music Center proudly displayed a Kitzke score on its homepage). In the opening of Winter Count, for actor,
bass drum, and string quartet, the performers are instructed to “ad lib crisply
rapid clicks, pops, whistles, and other chittering
vocal sounds,” which is notated with tiny interlocking squiggles and dots and
curlicues, just as one would imagine those sounds would look like if rendered
graphically. Later, to begin the
movement “The Blood Rain Breaking,” he notates the actor’s part with an
arrangement of hand-drawn stars, spirals, bars, circles, triangles, and other
shapes, and the directions read “ad lib a person going or already gone mad,
using words, grunts, squeals, groans, animal sounds, etc.” Kitzke’s graphic
notation is so clear that musicians around the world can discern his intentions
purely from following his scores.
The chittering vocal
sounds, which open Winter Count, lead directly into a
unison between the actor and string quartet’s second violin, both marked
“no vibrato.” Kitzke’s
music is full of these abrupt turns, each one quick upon the other, juxtaposing
sharply contrasting styles. A
frenetically active passage might follow one of meditative calm, and simple
lyricism emerges out of noisy free jazz-like riffs. Remarkably, the music never sounds
fragmentary or disjointed — there’s always organic flow within the
constant shift of material. Perhaps this
is because despite the first impression of Kitzke’s
compositions as being free wheeling and spontaneous,
they are in fact rigorously organized. Winter Count, for instance,
is arranged into eighteen parts, with musical interludes alternating with
recited texts, and two mirroring sections, “The Benediction of Light” and “The
Benediction of Darkness,” acting as a framing device. But shifting moods also speak to the
all-embracing scope of Kitzke’s work, which contains
multitudes.
The Green Automobile is a tour de
force for speaking pianist; the only performer so far has been Kitzke himself, since he has only recently started notating
the piece. While he’s performed it more
than fifty times over the years, each performance always sounds completely
spontaneous, as if he’s responding to Allen Ginsberg’s text on the spot. He also makes it seem completely natural to
be whistling and laughing and doing rapid-fire recitation of Ginsberg’s poem,
all during the most intricate piano playing, with the two hands often in
different meters, chord clusters pitted against walking bass, traveling across
the entire range of the keyboard with ease.
There are poignant moments when the action pauses, as in the wistful
reflection of childhood “Childhood youthtime age
& eternity/would open like sweet trees…” Occasionally the music mirrors the
text, for instance with the impressionistic high register tremolos in “The
windshield’s full of tears/rain wets our naked breasts…” But those are only
temporary detours in the Green Automobile’s careening adventures. It seems the most faithful possible rendering
of Ginsberg’s poem, keeping intact the long breath of the lines, the urgency
and vitality and spirit of the text, while also allowing time for moments of
tenderness and quiet. The Green
Automobile
is the third of Kitzke’s five pieces so far in the
amplified speaking pianist genre, the others being The Animist Child (1994), Sunflower Sutra (1999), There Is a Field (2008), and Bringing Roses
With Her Words (2009).
If Kitzke
is as much a storyteller as composer, his storytelling in The Paha Sapa Give-Back — commissioned in 1993 by the fearless
ensemble Essential Music — is minimal, but no less eloquent. In this piece for four percussion and piano,
simply the rhythmic repetition of “Paha Sapa”---the
Lakota term for Black Hills — shouted, whispered, and transformed into an
incantation and a prayer, tells the listener everything, and becomes a story in
itself. Kitzke
acknowledges the influence of Northern Plains Indian music, and we might hear
hard bop in the piano writing, and echoes of military bands in the use of snare
drums, but most of all what comes across is the healing affirmative power of
ritual and chant.
The Paha Sapa
Give-Back
begins with the four percussionists on one large calfskin bass drum in the
center of the stage, shouting “Paha Sapa” seven
times, leading into a unison one-hand roll on the big drum, over which the
pianist produces a haunting wailing sound on the strings inside the piano. The drum continues to roll like distant
thunder over which the piano plays a plaintive melody, while the percussionists
intone “Paha Sapa” again, this time gently. One by one they move to their separate drum
sets — arranged around the piano and bass drum — and by the end of
the piece they have gathered together again at the central bass drum for a
poignant chant, with sleigh bells overhead, and a final shouting of “Paha Sapa!” The last
vocalizations are “Give back!” shouted collectively, and then spoken softer, as
a final plea. By the conclusion, the
effect is of having gone through a shamanic journey: Kitzke’s
music brims with ceremonial power and beauty, and at the same time carries
forward the great tradition of American experimental music.
The Paha Sapa
Give-Back
is “an exhortation,” says Kitzke, for all of us to
pay attention to and act upon the sovereignty and sacred land claim issues of
the world’s indigenous peoples.” At the
heart of each Kitzke composition is a message of
tolerance, of social justice, of living a humane and ethical life. For Winter Count he collected
antiwar texts by Aeschylus, Walt Whitman, Harold Pinter, Rumi, Helen Mackay,
John Scott, and Anonymous, creating a timeless and universal reflection against
the horrors of wars past and present. The Green
Automobile
speaks to a more personal quest, but no less vividly and urgently. Most remarkable is how Kitzke
integrates his convictions and beliefs within music and text. You listen with as much delight as you
experience when you listen to any of your favorite composers, but you may find
yourself listening to this album over and over to grasp the full impact and significance
of these three astonishing works.
— Sarah Cahill, Berkeley, CA, 2014
Sarah Cahill is a pianist who has
commissioned Jerome Kitzke, Terry Riley, Frederic
Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, and other composers. She curates new music concerts at the
Berkeley Museum and at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, and her weekly
radio show can be heard at www.kalw.org
1. The Green Automobile
(text
by Allen Ginsberg)
The Green Automobile is a
freewheeling musical account of Allen Ginsberg’s 1953 poem of the same name
from his Reality Sandwiches collection.
I was drawn to the poem’s manically energized description of an imagined
trip taken in a green automobile by Ginsberg and his friend and occasional
lover Neal Cassady. The latter was perhaps best known
as being the model for the Dean Moriarty character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The trip ranges from California over the
Rocky Mountains to Denver with a tender detour to Texas and on to its ending in
New York City. Inside The Green
Automobile
the rough beauty of friendship is on display and all that is powerful and
exciting about the Beats is in full rhythmic flower.
The Green Automobile
If I had a Green Automobile
I’d go find my old companion
in his
house on the Western ocean.
Ha ! Ha ! Ha !
Ha ! Ha !
I’d honk my horn at his manly gate,
inside
his wife and three
children
sprawl naked
on the
living room floor.
He’d come running out
to
my car full of heroic beer
and
jump screaming at the wheel
for he is the greater driver.
We’d pilgrimage to the highest mount
of
our earlier Rocky Mountain visions
laughing
in each others arms,
delight
surpassing the highest Rockies,
and after old
agony, drunk with new years,
bounding
toward the snowy horizon
blasting
the dashboard with original bop
hot rod on the mountain
we’d batter up the
cloudy highway
where
angels of anxiety
careen
through the trees
and
scream out of the engine.
We’d burn all night on the jackpine peak
seen
from Denver in the summer dark,
forestlike unnatural radiance
illuminating the mountaintop:
childhood youthtime age & eternity
would
open like sweet trees
in
the nights of another spring
and dumbfound us with love,
for we can see
together
the
beauty of souls
hidden
like diamonds
in the clock of the world,
like Chinese
magicians can
confound
the immortals
with
our intellectuality
hidden in the mist,
in the Green
Automobile
which
I have invented
imagined
and visioned
on the roads of the world
more real than the
engine
on a
track in the desert
purer
than Greyhound and
swifter than physical jetplane.
Denver! Denver! we’ll
return
roaring
across the City & County Building lawn
which
catches the pure emerald flame
streaming in the wake of our auto.
This time we’ll buy up the city!
I cashed a great check in my
skull bank
to
found a miraculous college of the body
up on the bus terminal roof.
But first we’ll drive the stations
of downtown,
poolhall flophouse jazzjoint
jail
whorehouse
down Folsom
to the darkest alleys of Larimer
paying respects to
Denver’s father
lost
on the railroad tracks,
stupor
of wine and silence
hallowing the slum of his decades,
salute him and his
saintly suitcase
of
dark muscatel, drink
and
smash the sweet bottles
on Diesels in allegiance.
Then we go driving drunk on
boulevards
where
armies march and still parade
staggering
under the invisible
banner of Reality --
hurtling through the
street
in
the auto of our fate
we
share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each others’ fortunes:
fames of supernatural
illumination,
bleak
rainy gaps of time,
great
art learned in desolation
and
we beat apart after six decades. . .
and on an asphalt
crossroad,
deal
with each other in princely
gentleness
once more, recalling
famous dead talks of other cities.
The windshield’s full of tears,
rain
wets our naked breasts,
we
kneel together in the shade
amid the traffic of night in paradise
and now renew the
solitary vow
we
made each other take
in
Texas, once:
I can’t
inscribe here. . .
. . . . . .
How many Saturday nights will be
made
drunken by this legend?
How will young Denver come to mourn
her forgotten sexual angel?
How many boys will strike the black
piano
in
imitation of the excess of a native saint?
Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high
schools
of melancholy night?
While all the time in Eternity
in
the wan light of this poem’s radio
we’ll
sit behind forgotten shades
hearkening
the lost jazz of all Saturdays.
Neal, we’ll be real heroes now
in a
war between our cocks and time:
let’s
be the angels of the world’s desire
and take the
world to bed with us before
we die.
Sleeping alone, or with companion,
girl
or fairy sheep or dream,
I’ll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:
all men fall, our fathers fell before,
but resurrecting
that lost flesh
is but
a moment’s work of mind:
an
ageless monument to love
in the imagination:
memorial built out of
our own bodies
consumed
by the invisible poem --
We’ll shudder in Denver and
endure
though
blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.
So this Green Automobile:
I give you in
flight
a
present, a present
from my imagination.
We will go riding
over
the Rockies,
we’ll
go on riding
all night long until dawn,
then back to your
railroad, the SP
your
house and your children
and
broken leg destiny
you’ll ride down the plains
in the morning:
and back
to
my visions, my office
and
eastern apartment
I’ll return
to New York.
NY 1953
2. The Paha Sapa
Give-Back
The Paha Sapa
Give-Back
is an exhortation to pay attention to and act upon the sovereignty and sacred
land claim issues of the world’s indigenous peoples. Paha Sapa means Black
Hills in Lakota. They call them “the
heart of everything that is”. Since the
1870’s the Lakota have been struggling on the battlefield and in the courtroom
to protect and reclaim the Black Hills, which had been declared legally theirs
by the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty. Soon after George Armstrong Custer’s illegal
1874 discovery of gold in the Black Hills, white miners began to flood the Paha
Sapa in violation of the treaty. Then shortly after
Custer’s annihilation in 1876 at the Little Big Horn there came a series of
illegal land deals that robbed the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho of their holy
land. In 1975 the U.S. Court of Claims
called the government’s conduct toward the Lakota in all probability “the most
ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings” in U.S. history. The government’s response was to offer money
as compensation, which the Lakota refused then and continue to refuse today.
“The Black Hills are not for sale” became a rallying cry. What they want and deserve are honorable
dealings in regard to considerations of land-return legislation. At the time this piece was being planned and
written there had already been legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate by
then Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey.
The political climate was simply not right and the legislation stalled
and had to be put on the back burner.
Currently it is off the burner entirely but there is no reason it cannot
come back on. It seems naïve to think
that we, as relatively recent occupants of this land, can ever hope to relieve
the social ills that plague us without first honestly attending to the
dishonorable dealings foisted upon the original inhabitants during the creation
of the United States. In
spirit-opposition to the traditional Indian ‘give-away’, The Paha Sapa Give-Back suggests we do just that! Give the land back and attend the flower that
blooms from the act.
While I am grateful for the clear
influence of Northern Plains Indian Music on this work, The Paha Sapa Give-Back contains no existing tunes or forms from
that incredible music. This work, along
with Mad
Coyote Madly Sings (1991), We Need to Dream All This Again (1993), and Woope (1994) form a
quartet of pieces that deal with the Black Hills land issues and have been
combined into one large theatrical musical work also called The Paha Sapa Give-Back with texts and scenes by Kathleen
Masterson. The Paha Sapa Give-Back on this recording was commissioned by
Essential Music and is dedicated to all indigenous peoples still fighting for
the rights to their scared lands. Thanks
to Charles Wood, John Kennedy, Charlotte Black Elk and Gerald Clifford.
Text:
Paha Sapa
Give-Back
3. Winter Count [CD ONLY: NOT
AVAILABLE AS DIGITAL DOWNLOAD]
(texts
by Aeschylus, John Scott, Anonymous, Helen Mackay, Harold Pinter, Walt Whitman,
Rumi)
Among several tribes on the
northern plains, the passage of time from one summer to the
next is marked by noting a single memorable event. The sequence of such memories, recorded
pictographically on a buffalo robe or spoken aloud, is called a winter
count. Several winter counts might be in
progress at any one time in the same tribe; each
differing according to the personality of its keeper.
— from
Barry Lopez’s Winter Count
The Winter Count recorded here
is an antiwar work that expresses that view through the words of these seven
poets: Aeschylus, John Scott, Anonymous, Helen Mackay, Harold Pinter, Walt
Whitman and Rumi. The poets’ timeless
words offer reflections on war during Aeschylus’ time, the American Revolution,
the American Civil War, WWI, WWII, and the first Gulf War. All these poets are no longer alive, but if
they were I think they would be creating new poems speaking out not just
against war in general, but also against the idea that there is any longer such
a thing as a winnable war, a fact most recently manifested in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Allen Ginsberg asked, “When will we end the human war”? Perhaps it is not, so to speak, humanly
possible. But Winter Count aspires more to
Whitman’s: “Beautiful that
war and its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost”. Beautiful indeed.
Winter Count is dedicated
with love to Catherine Kahler. Special thanks to Jennifer
Kathryn Marshall.
Text:
The first casualty of war is Truth.
The Blood Rain Breaking
(Aeschylus)
My thoughts are swept away and I go
bewildered.
Where shall I turn the brain’s
activity in speed when
the house is falling?
There is fear in the beat of the
blood rain breaking
wall and tower. The drops come thicker.
Still fate grinds on yet more
stones the blade
for more acts of
terror.
The Drum (John Scott)
I hate that drum’s discordant
sound,
Parading round, and round, and
round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure
yields,
And lures from cities and from
fields,
To sell their
liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace and glittering arms;
And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To march, and
fight, and fall, in foreign lands.
I hate that drum’s discordant
sound,
Parading round, and round, and
round:
To me it talks of ravaged plains,
And burning towns, and ruined
swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying
groans,
And widow’s tears, and orphans’
moans;
And all that Misery’s hand bestows,
To fill the
catalogue of human woes.
Jesus, They Run Into the
Millions
(anonymous
WWII latrine graffiti)
Soldiers who wish to be a hero
Are practically
zero,
But those who wish to be civilians,
Jesus, they run into the millions.
Train (Helen Mackay)
Will the train never start?
God, make the train start.
She cannot bear it, keeping up so
long;
and he, he no more
tries to laugh at her.
He is going.
She holds his two hands now.
Now, she has touch of him and sight
of him.
And then he will be gone.
He will be gone.
They are so young.
She stands under the window of his
carriage,
and he stands in
the window.
They hold each other’s hands
across the window
ledge.
And look and look,
and know they may
never look again.
The great clock of the station,---
how strange it is.
Terrible that
the minutes go.
Terrible that
the minutes never go.
They had walked the platform for so
long,
up and down, and
up and down---
the platform in the
rainy morning,
up and down and up
and down.
The guard came by, calling,
‘Take your places, take your
places’.
She stands under the window of his
carriage,
and he stands in
the window.
God, make the train start!
Before they cannot bear it,
make the train
start!
God, make the train start!
The three children, there,
in black, with the
old nurse,
standing together, and
looking, and looking,
up at their father
in the carriage window,
they are so forlorn
and silent.
The little girl will not cry,
but her chin
trembles.
She throws back her head,
with its stiff
little braid,
and will not cry.
Her father leans down,
out over the ledge
of the window,
and kisses her, and
kisses her.
She must be like her mother,
and it must be the
mother who is dead.
The nurse lifts the smallest boy,
and his father
kisses him,
leaning through the
carriage window.
The big boy stands very straight,
and looks at his
father,
and looks, and
never takes his eyes from him.
And knows he may never look again.
Will the train never start?
God, make the train start!
The father reaches his hand down
from the
window,
and grips the boy’s
hand,
and does not speak
at all.
Will the train never start?
He lets the boy’s and go.
Will the train never start?
He takes the boy’s chin in his
hand,
leaning out through the
window,
and lifts the face
that is so young, to his.
They look and look,
and know they may
never look again.
Will the train never start?
God, make the train start!
American Football (a reflection
upon the Gulf War)
(Harold Pinter)
Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
We blew the shit right back up
their own ass
And out their
fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!
Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good
things.
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.
Praise the Lord for all good
things.
We blew their balls into shards of
dust,
Into shards of
fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here
and kiss
me on the mouth.
Look Down Fair Moon (Walt
Whitman)
Look down fair moon and bathe this
scene,
Pour softly down night’s nimbus
floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
On the dead on their backs with
arms toss’d wide,
Pour down your unstinted nimbus
sacred moon.
Reconciliation (Walt Whitman)
WORD over all, beautiful as the
sky,
Beautiful that war and all its
deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death
and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine
as myself is dead.
I look where he lies white-faced
and still in the coffin—I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my
lips the white face in the coffin.
Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing
and Rightdoing
(Rumi, translation by Coleman
Barks)
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that
grass,
The world is too full to talk
about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase,
each other,
Does not make sense.
Epilogue: A Clear Midnight
(Walt Whitman)
This is thy hour O soul, thy free
flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the
day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent,
gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep,
death and the stars.
CREDITS
The Green Automobile:
Produced, edited and engineered by
Scott Worthington. Recorded April 28th, 2012 at the University of California
San Diego, San Diego, CA. “The Green Automobile” © 1953 by May King Poetry
Music. Used by permission.
The Paha Sapa
Give-Back:
Produced by Silas Brown of Legacy
Sound.
Edited by Charlie Post of PostProductions Audio.
Engineered by Randy Crafton.
Recorded August 21-22, 2013 at
Kaleidoscope Sound
in Union City, NJ.
Winter Count:
Produced and edited by Silas Brown
of Legacy Sound.
Engineered by Randy Crafton.
Recorded October 10-11, 2013 at
Kaleidoscope Sound.
“Agamemnon” selection, from The
Complete Greek Tragedies, translation by Richmond Lattimore
and published by the University of Chicago Press, copyright 1947 by Richmond Lattimore. “Jesus, They Run Into the Millions”, “Train”
used by permission. “American Football”
by Harold Pinter © 2002 Fraser 52 Limited from The Essential Pinter published by
Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Used by permission
of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. and Judy Daish Associates
Limited. Any third party use of this
material is prohibited. “Out Beyond
Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing” translation used
by permission of Coleman Barks. All other poems are public domain.
Mastered by Silas Brown at Legacy
Sound
Executive producer: Jerome Kitzke
All works published by Peer
International Corp./
Peermusic III, Ltd. (BMI)
Cover image – Jerome Kitzke
Cover graphic designer – Aleksandr Karjaka
Product Photographer – Aleksandr Karjaka
Composer photo – Brooks
Hirsch
Composer essay – Sarah Cahill
Program notes – Jerome Kitzke
Peermusic Classical
www.peermusicclassical.com
www.ethelcentral.org
innova is supported by
an endowment from the
McKnight Foundation.
Philip Blackburn, director, design
Chris Campbell, operations manager
Steve McPherson, publicist
Innova.mu
Gramercy to:
Charlotte Black Elk, Gerald
Clifford, Todd Vunderink, Erin Rogers, Peer Music,
Sarah Cahill, Eugene and Lorraine Kitzke, Mary
Johnson, Catherine Kahler, Jennifer Kathryn Marshall,
ETHEL (Ralph Farris, Kip Jones, Dorothy Lawson, Tema Watstein), Patty Kilroy, Andrea Woodner,
The Mad Coyote, Barbara Merjan, Jay Johnson, Jude Traxler, Mike Perdue, Peggy Kampmeier,
Kathleen Masterson, Silas Brown, Randy Crafton, Charlie Post, Doron Schachter, Bonnie Whiting
Smith, Scott Worthington, Allen Ginsberg, Mary Shummon,
Paul Kitzke and family, Patrice Elacqua,
David Maass, Laura Shummon Maass, the Wessel family, Guy Klucevsek, Essential Music, John Kennedy, Chuck Wood,
April Thibeault, Aleksandr Karjaka, Brooks Hirsch, Philip Blackburn, Christopher
Campbell, Steve McPherson, Innova Recordings, the
American Composers Forum, The Center at West Park, WXY Architecture and Urban
Design, Roulette, Ayers Percussion,
University of California San Diego, Ucross, The
MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Millay Colony, Alice
Farm, Kaleidoscope Sound, The Pine Ridge Reservation, Mato
Tipi, and 616 Aspen Street.
This recording is dedicated to
Eugene David Kitzke (1923-2011), Lorraine Grace Kitzke (1920-2012), and Randol
Thomas Wessel (April 17th, 2014 - April 17th, 2014)
— Jerome Kitzke