Last night I was at Herbst Theater for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players' performance of six new chamber orchestra pieces from the latest round of the ARTZenter Emerging Composer Grant Program. This admirable program was, founded & funded by Tony Magee of the Lagunitas Brewing Company, & it's nice to see a successful executive do something for the greater artistic good with his wealth. I was at last January's concert (my entry is here) though I unfortunately had a conflict with the last concert (these performances happen two or three times a year).
Magee was ill & could not attend, but a friend & colleague of his opened with some introductory remarks about the program. Eric Dudley, the Artistic Director of the SFCMP & the evening's conductor, then took over, noting that we didn't need more talking (he was right & I was grateful, though I did like having the composers give brief descriptions of their pieces, especially as some of them differed a bit from their statements in the program) so he would just introduce each composer before his piece was performed. It was noted in the program that the order of performance would be given from the stage, & I assume Dudley's deft hand could be seen in the thoughtful arrangement of pieces, with more meditative numbers separating the more rambunctious. All the pieces were gripping & thought-provoking, & I would gladly have heard all of them again.
First was Three Airs by Benjamin Webster, music in three parts based on field recordings he had made around New Haven, Connecticut, which is or was his home (so "airs" is a pun, referring both the the musical concept of an air, as in Bach's Air on the G String, & to being out in the open air). This was one of several pieces on the program that conjured vividly the sense of walking through a town or city, in a way that made me almost nostalgic, as most urban areas these days are monotonous concatenations of car noise & corporate pop/rap music. Here there was lovely variety, including birdsong. There was a gentle & flowing element amid the urban energy.
Next was Traces in a Shallow Pool by James Larkins. His note in the program compares the effect he was aiming for as an examination of the disturbance even a gentle touch can cause on a smooth surface of water; the ripples cascade out, changing the water far beyond the initial touch. In his description from the stage, he mentioned how words & phrases, sometimes randomly thrust on us, can later reverberate in our minds & therefore our lives. I appreciated that he was giving us something besides what we could read in the program, & Dudley mentioned that it was useful for the musicians to hear these different perspectives after they'd been working on the nitty-gritty of a piece; it reframes the sounds for them. As you might expect from those metaphorical summations, the piece had a relatively calm surface that built & rippled & developed in intriguing ways.
That was followed, & the first half closed with, a more extroverted work, Färgstark (Colorful), which, despite its Swedish (maybe IKEA-derived?) title is by a Brazilian composer, Gabriel Duarte DaSilva. True to its title, there was great play of orchestral colors here, often inspired by birdsong (& given the composer's origin, one imagined brightly colored tropical birds) & the rhythms of Latin jazz bands; there was a lot of lively work among the percussionists. One thing that struck me, amid the swirling shifting sounds, was the composer's rather daring use of extended silences; silence is an important & neglected component of music, so I loved seeing it given some prominence, & fortunately the audience knew enough not to interrupt with "I guess this is over" applause.
After the brief intermission, we resumed with Nanjing Fragments by Daniel (Jingyang) Cui, another city-scape in three parts, though the music is played seamlessly, as if it were one on-going movement, which is part of Cui's point about the lengthy history of his native metropolis; contrary to Saint Paul, here we do have a continuing city. The opening, the first & relatively brief movement, is a fanfare reflecting Nanjing's imperial & political history as the southern capital of China; a magnificent stepping of sound is followed by confident, spreading strings; that is repeated a few times, & gives way to a piece inspired by the Nanjing Salted Duck (which is how Wikipedia refers to it, though Cui described it as "salt-water duck"), a classic dish of the region (despite my love of duck, I have never had it; it seems to be the southern equivalent of Peking Duck, & I love so much the idea of a musical piece based on a way of preparing duck). In his talk Cui said that the duck was a way of exploring the on-going nature of the essential city; if you eat Nanjing salt-water duck today, you are eating basically the same dish you would have eaten centuries ago). This was a quieter, cumulative movement; the salt-water preparation lapped at our ears; woodwinds gently squawked like ducks. The third movement captured the boisterous street sounds of Cui's youth (which wasn't that long ago, actually), the sounds of street vendors & "old Chinese Aunties" & auto traffic: again, a lively street scene, that made me think of when cities were more walkable. Cui said that the authorities have been cracking down on this sort of noise, thinking it old-fashioned & unsuited for streamlined modernity, which is too bad.
That was followed by When . . . Lost by Peter Chatterjee; the ellipsis helps indicate his interest, which is in conveying the effects of trauma & loss on an individual (he suggested in his speech that the pandemic had spurred his consideration of the psychological effects of trauma, saying that he began thinking about these things four or five years ago, though I also thought of the traumatic elections we've had since that time). The piece was sort of a portrait in composition, with odd lapses & reappearances, reflecting the way troubling & tragic memories get repressed or elided but surface nonetheless.
The final piece was Angel Gómez Ramos's Synecdoche, or, to give it its full title, Synecdoche (Bulerías del Sentimiento Oceánico); bulerías is apparently a type of flamenco rhythm, but also derives from a Spanish slang term for "to mock"; so the subtitle seems to mean something like "a dance to / a mockery of oceanic feelings, which can be either feelings about the ocean or vast unfathomable mysteries of feeling), & synecdoche of course means to take a portion of something as representative of the whole. It's a surrealist-inspired piece, about the limits of our perceptions (& I have to admit by this point it was hard to absorb more, given the riches of the evening). It was another lively, entrancing piece. I found it interesting how many of the pieces ended rather gently; I think this was the one that finished with reverberations dying away.
I don't take notes during performances so I hope I've accurately conveyed the nature of each piece. It was an impressive evening; each composer graciously thanked Dudley & the musicians of SFCMP, & the thanks were well-deserved. As I mentioned earlier, I would gladly have sat through all the pieces again. I will say that I was selfishly glad I could sit without anyone else near me, but this enticing music & the marvelous performances deserved a bigger crowd than they got last night. Best wishes to these talented young composers on their life in Art.
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