Riley - Salome Dances for Peace

Riley's Salome Dances for Peace (1985-86) must be a pretty unique specimen in the quartet literature. It's a composition of almost 2 hours grafted on the backbone of a fanciful narrative. It goes like this: "In Riley's narrative, the heroine is Salome, the legendary seductress in King Herod's court who called for the head of John the Baptist to be brought to her on a plate in return for removing her seven veils during a lewd dance. Now, 2000 years after Salome's famous dance, peace has been stolen from the earth by dark forces and Salome is chosen to bring it back. In Anthem of the Great Spirit, the first part of Salome Dances for Peace, Salome is summoned to the Great Spirit, who sees in her the embodiment of the feminine force. Throughout this first section of the score, she is guided by sages in a Peace Dance; she receives the gift of innocence in Fanfare in the Minimal Kingdom; she develops the discipline to thwart Wild Talker, who represents sexual temptation; and she is initiated as a warrior by the shaman Half Wolf during More Ceremonial Races. 

In order to fulfill her mission, Salome and Half Wolf descend into the gloomy underworld (...). In Conquest of the War Demons, which is the quartet's largeste development section, a battle is fought, peace recaptured, and the entire underworld, with all its fantastic beings, levitated into the Realm of Light. 

Once more a dance, Salome entertains around the world - in The Gift, we find her in Tibet, and, as the music becomes more folklike, Mongolia. Once again she is charged with a mission: to attract the attention of the world's two most powerful leaders. Seducing both the Bear Father and the Great White Father, which leads to the latter's emotional breakdown and finally to epiphany in The Ecstasy, Salome succeeds in winning world peace. The score ends with the Good Medicine Dance, a return to old wisdom and teachings, with the counsel to become guileless and pursue self-knowledge" (from Mark Swed's notes in the CD booklet). Most unusual stuff for a composition (though not half as ridiculous as Strauss' program for his Sinfonia Domestica). It reminds me a little about Castanada's teachings of Don Juan. 

I've patiently dug into the music for a week now. The double CD had been in the house for a long time, but I never really took the opportunity to listen to it. I believe the time I spent listening to it again and again this week has very well paid off.

As indicated by the booklet extract, the work falls into five parts. To give a sense of scale, here are indicative timings I took from Schirmer's website (the booklet doesn't show timings at all):

Anthem of the Great Spirit (33:00)

Conquest of the War Demons (33:47)

The Gift (18:21)

The Ecstasy (15:24)

Good Medicine (13:25)

Each part is played without breaks, despite the division into a more finegrained narrative sequence. How to characterise this music? Taken at face value, it is not 'difficult'. It is tonal, and even pleasingly so. And yet because of its length and texture it presents an obvious challenge to the listener. Melodically, dynamically and rhythmically it can, at first sight, come across as fairly monotonous. The dominant expression is one of listening to a rich, busy musical tapestry of which motifs and hues are constantly changing. In that sense the work certainly inscribes itself in a minimalist aesthetic.  

The music sounds folksy in an oblique kind of way. It's understated and solemn, priestly at the same time. The first part, the Anthem, is generally slow and very reflective. I can imagine that the casual listener never gets beyond this first chapter. The Conquest is more lively and contrapuntal and has indeed more of a development character. However, exuberant it is not. The Gift is again more thoughtful and brings with it the luminosity and sense of space of the Tibetan high plateau and Mongolian steppes. This is the most easily accessible and colourful part of the score. The Epiphany is the most mysterious section. There are echoes of Bartok's Mandarin (also a seduction scene). However, the music is extremely relaxed in a parlando kind of style and hardly rises above piano dynamics. Only the At the Summit section is more lively and folksy. Good Medicine is then a fairly robust dance that brings the work to an upbeat, festive conclusion. 

The Kronos Quartet play this whole work with remarkable leisureliness. It's as if they had been smoking pot during the recording sessions at Skywalker Ranch, north of San Francisco.  There certainly is a potential for more dynamic contrasts in this score, but they must have consciously abstained from doing so. This certainly have contributed to the dreamlike quality of the music. At this point there is no alternative recording available, I believe, but it seems to me there is certainly a place for other interpretations.

I am writing as if the whole Salome suite is to be considered as a single work. I assume it is, although the Schirmer website, for example, annotates Good Medicine as String Quartet nr. 10. Riley himself seems to be very cavalier about this. His website includes a partial list of works and there we find simply reference to Salome as a 5-part work for string quartet. I believe it does hold up well as a giant quartet. Structurally it seems to make sense (although there is no way it can be squeezed into a traditional formal template). 

Discophage, one of the more erudite reviewers on Amazon, thought "the music is wonderfully colorful and inventive, 20th century timeless, immensely appealing, going through a wide variety of moods, very free in construction but the juxtapositions always sound organic. This is not high-browed music (and don't get me wrong: I enjoy high-browed music) but still it is highly cultivated, drawing upon a vast but concealed knowledge of both vernacular and art music." It's one of his favourite quartets of the latter half of the 20th century (with Ligeti, Dutilleux, Lutoslawski and Isang Yun). I can certainly go along with the general line of his assessment. Salome is a very fine piece of work. Like Haydn it cleans the palate and creates space in the mind. It sounds like music that has been composed by a wise, free and childlike spirit.

A very pleasant discovery to which I will certainly return. I'd like to get hold of Riley's Requiem for Adam too.