Charlemagne Palestine
From Etudes to Cataclysms
(Sub Rosa)
By Erik Morse
Charlemagne Palestine (real name: Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine) has long been an unrecognized co-star in the avant-celebrity tradition of minimalism. Born in Brooklyn and working alongside his more famous brethren for decades, Palestine blends entrancing keyboard intervals with stylized performance and mythmaking. In his newest two-CD collection of compositions, From Etudes to Cataclysms, the musician gets second billing to the unique piano he plays.
Christened the Borgato by its eponymous inventor, a musician from Padua, the instrument consists of two grand piano bodies, constructed vertically, with the first containing all 88 keys and sitting at normal playing height while the second contains only the lower 37 notes and rests near the feet. Having previously learned to perform on the carillon, a medieval bell instrument played with the fists and feet, Palestine was reportedly eager to test his dexterity on the mutant machine. Recorded over three days at the Church of Saint Apollinare Monticello in Lonigo, Italy, the end product is a 140 minute tour de force of mindful possibilities and mindless boredom.
The first disc (“Etudes”) consists almost entirely of Palestine’s exercises with repetition and formality as he builds enormous ghostly overtones from long periods of high- and low-end trilling. From the opening “super high tones” to the closing “tritone octave ½”, there is an ongoing struggle, in both performance and perception, between obscure mathematical process and arcane artistic license. The tension builds further and further as the individual notes blur into less delineated “clusters” of sound without harmonic resolution. Drones, secreted beneath the surface sounds, phase in and out with a spectral menace.
As with most extended minimalist compositions, there are various levels of intention and thus appreciation simultaneously at work. While the abstractionist and musicologist might luxuriate in so-called “microtonal” resonances spiriting between the Western intervals of the piano, casual listeners may simply gape at Palestine’s superhuman playing endurance. Regardless, the listener hangs on to this sonic maelstrom half in suspense and half in stupor. The hypnotic effect is not very different from that produced by LaMonte Young’s The Well Tuned Piano (Gramavision, 1988) or the film soundtracks of Ligeti or Donaggio. And most of the pieces do have a strong kinaesthetic component to them, eschewing the aural for a chimerical cinematography.
The second disc exudes similar hypnomonotony but the pianist’s trills reside more on the lower end as he seems to take full advantage of the “bass” piano at his feet. In “Cataclisma 2” and “Cataclisma 3,” the use of tension and resolution is particularly effective, again invoking the nocturnal soundtrack moods of Eyes Wide Shut or any of a dozen “metaphysical” crime films. By “Cataclisma 4,” a behemoth piece clocking in at nearly 20 minutes, the divisions between tracks seem arbitrary or beyond a dilettante’s comprehension. Unfortunately, the recording fails to present the overall image of a Charlemagne Palestine recital, where the performer in question often surrounds himself with stuffed teddy bears, books, and aged cognac. Such knick-knacks probably connote a humor and playfulness that is sorely missing in the heavy intellectual conceits of From Etudes to Cataclysms. Nonetheless, for followers of the current avant-garde, the work of this renegade pianist has few equals.
