There can really be no question at this point: John Zorn is the intellectual renaissance man of our age, the East Village Thomas Jefferson. One can easily venture that by simply researching the panoply of allusions that dot Zorn's liner notes, it's possible to be familiar with more cultural phenomena than you would gather in a lifetime at a university. Ennio Morricone, the avant-Jewish Masada, soundtracks to Maya Deren, Tonic concerts with jazz's Derek Bailey, minimalism's Phill Niblock, no-wave's Arto Lindsay and Cremaster composer Jonathan Bepler. His name is a special feature on the Branded to Kill DVD! I, and people like me, would probably obsessively idolize him, if only he wasn't, you know, a weird, bespectacled 50-year-old saxophonist.
And now Chimeras, with liner notes that will effectively triple the number of allusions already out there. Get your notebook out. The cover is a Hieronymous Bosch painting. The actual composition is vaguely influenced by Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (currently best known in the Pierre Boulez version). Inside, we learn the unification of the composition was achieved through a musical adaptation of the self-imposed barriers of the lipogram as best exemplified by the great French author, Georges Perec, and his Sixth Century predecessor, Fabius Planciades Fulgentius. All this means that each of the twelve compositions of Chimeras avoids one specific pitch which, when accumulated, form "the first tone row Schoenberg ever utilized." The music almost doesn't matter. If you like spending your Saturday nights in the darker corridors of MoMA, you've probably already given this a 9.5, which, unfortunately, is not far from the truth.
Pierrot Lunaire is a strange choice for Zorn, and since this is Zorn we're talking about, is actually relatively typical. It was Schoenberg's return to traditional tonality after his earlier atonal works, and (with different instruments on each section) achieves the intimacy of a small chamber group. It's also absolute anarchy, the attempts of the orchestration to match Pierrot's psychological turmoil leading the piece through tortuous paths and frantic ascensions. The only two features really carried over to Chimeras are the different variations of instrumentation and the persistent schizophrenia of vocalist Ilana Davidson and her accompaniment.
The first piece lifts a staccato clarinet and scaling violin over lethargic flute and percussion, until, in its culmination, the two trajectories combust in one of Zorn's signature freak-outs, courtesy of a chamber orchestra. Culmination is the main theme here, each piece building and building until the eleventh piece's convergence of every instrument at the climax of the vocalist's story (whatever that may be, I know it involves a lot of "tick-a-tick"ing). The voice is truly revelatory here. At first, Ilana Davidson is indistinguishable from a violin in a higher register-- and then you realize, thirty seconds later, that that's a human being mourning and moaning away. She assiduously cripples the "speech-singing" on Pierrot Lumaire, and adds some philosophical tension to the entire piece. While in Schoenberg's version, it seems clear the orchestration is intended to convey Pierrot's psyche, in Chimeras, it's difficult to say if the orchestration is a reflection of the vocalist's tantrum or its catalyst. As a result, the two sides mimic each other (ahh, right, the chimera), a disconcertion compounded by the addition of Elizabeth Farnum's echoing voice and William Winant's percussive chiseling.
All this absent-pitch-lipogram stuff is entirely irrelevant if you haven't been taking two hours of music theory every day for the last three years. But the piece itself is thrillingly diverse, suddenly going from luminous to lugubrious and from classical to chaotic. It's a bold, unexpected new chapter in Zorn's corpus, or it would be if we didn't expect that from him.
