Score Salon:
Joshua Kohl on Peter Maxwell-Davies' Eight Songs For A Mad King

August 5, 2002 at Bad Animals

Back in the Sixties, Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) was at the cutting edge of modernity, a work that was controversial and powerfully expressed, disturbing yet at the same time subversively exciting. The work is an extravagant, disturbing and poignant portrayal of madness. The king is George III of England - or maybe another madman who believes himself to be that monarch - vocalizing weirdly as he bemoans his fate and tries to teach his instrumentalist-birds to sing. The string and woodwind players are the captives of his insanity, intended to play from within giant cages, while the percussionist is his keeper, holding him within the confines of a maddened musical sensibility. But all the musicians are essentially projections from within his own mind. The focus is always on him, and on his wild vocal performances, which include various kinds of Sprechgesang, chords and a range of over four octaves. The virtuosity of the instrumentalists is no less, nor that of the composer in playing spikily over a range of eighteenth-century references.

Three decades on, Eight Songs for a Mad King has lost none of its potent drama as a piece of music theater, evolving into an established, classic piece of music-theater. England's Daily Telegraph said of a 1999 30th Anniversary performance: "Eight Songs for a Mad King remains one of this composer's finest and most moving achievements."

Composer and Degenerate Art Ensemble conductor Joshua Kohl moderated an evening on this work. Joshua Kohl attended the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music (Boston, MA), and received a BA in Composition from the Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle, Washington). He has studied composition with internationally renown composers Bright Sheng, Bern Herbolsheimer, and Jara Powell, director of the acclaimed Gamelan Pacifica.

Kohl's compositions have been performed in Boston, Philadelphia, and extensively throughout California, Washington and Oregon. Concerts including his works have been performed at the Oberlin Dance Company Theater (San Francisco), Seattle Asian Art Museum, Temple University (Philadelphia, PA), the Clinton Street Theater (Portland, OR), Seattle's KUOW-FM, KCMU-FM, and KNDD-FM, the Bumbershoot Festival, the Fremont Outdoor Cinema, Venue 9 (San Francisco), Seattle Experimental Opera, the Northwest Asian American Theatre's Winterfest, On the Board's Northwest New Works Festival.

Of Mad King, Joshua says the piece is an excellent example from which to explore "the techniques and approach to the personal ensemble, a group with which you are intimately experienced with, and writing for the strengths and abilities of the players available to you. It is also the non-exact, but amazingly effective use of breaking the ensemble up into rhythmic units and throwing them against each other, without scoring out the outcome, just contrasting them freely. It is the use of graphic notation. All of these types of issues, which at once seem quite obscure, but in actual practice, they can be fantastic ways of achieving powerful textures, and let the music breathe, and even in some cases, allow the composer to achieve more complex results, with less need for tight control."

Capitol Music Center is the official sponsor of the SCA Monthly Score Salon.

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