Supove plays Mattingly: Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field at the Center for New Music

Last Friday the Center for New Music hosted the west coast premiere of Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field, an epic (2+ hour) piece for solo piano by Dylan Mattingly, played by Kathleen Supové. I thought this sounded interesting, so off I went. I had heard a few pieces by Mattingly before, one at the Berkeley Symphony a few years ago and then a piece in honor of Terry Riley commissioned by Sarah Cahill for Riley's 80th birthday last year. I liked both pieces very much and had the feeling that Mattingly was an artist suited to long forms, so a solo ramble through the piano for several hours sounded right. The evocative title also intrigued me, suggesting an examination of being a certain type of romantic young man – drawn to youthful male archetypes like the warrior and the athlete, yet in a romantic, even nostalgic way removed enough from general culture to be individual and aestheticized. Achilles suggests an affinity for the foundational Greek classics, and Ebbets Field (home of the long-departed Brooklyn Dodgers) is a touchstone for the dreamier baseball fans (dreaming itself, as suggested by the title, also seems like an important theme, as if the future is dreamt of by the past, or the warrior dreams up his paler avatar, the athlete; in any case, the suggestion is of a fluid world with its own interior logic, but one that is on-going and continuous over distant times and places). The piece may have more particular meanings for the composer, but I think these things are enough as entry-ways for the listener.

The work is in 24 sections, as is the Iliad, but the correspondence is not necessarily direct; though section 22 is Death of Hektor, and the 22nd book of the Iliad indeed describes the death of Hektor, section 23 is Ebbets Field – though that is perhaps a reflection of the funeral games for Patroclus in Book 23 of the Iliad? Some titles directly reflect the Iliad (Catalogue of Heroes, Divine Rage: Ocean), some directly reflect the history of the Brooklyn Dodgers (For Jackie Robinson); others are more generally poetic (First Spring; Last Spring; Love, Death, and Paleoclimates; and one teasingly titled simply Music). I have to say I decided not to follow along with the titles, but just to listen to the onrush of music, a decision I wish had been made by some of the others in the very full house, who somehow managed to make astonishing noise with their programs; since the program was a single sheet of paper printed on both sides, I really have to salute their ingenuity.

Kathleen Supové is a physically small woman; her hair was in a purply-red Louise Brooks bob, and she was wearing short black boots, black tights, and kind of a short slip with a large leopard-skin print with a thick row of black lace at the bottom. The effect was striking, unusual for a performer, and even authoritative – no one wears leopard-skin with the intention of being overlooked or blending in. But any suggestion of studied eccentricity or the theatrically "artistic" was belied by her straightforward relationship to the piano; she did not play to the audience, but connected to the sheet music in front of her with intense concentration, occasionally nodding to or glancing at the page-turner (whom she graciously introduced during the intermission; his first name was Austin but I did not catch his second name) but then returning directly to the music. I enjoyed her glittering, aggressive playing. I did feel that the Center's Yamaha piano was occasionally over-bright, but maybe that was because I was very close (front row, far right).

From the chiming gamelan-like opening Invocation to the final Last Spring, the time actually flew by, which speaks well for both composer and performer. Obviously two hours and maybe 20 minutes of new music is a lot to take in. A recording would be wonderful, for repeated listening and for movement-by-movement analysis of what strikes the live listener, with almost palpable force, as a Scamander-River-like onrush of music, even with several Messiaen-like moments of radiant stasis, like a pulsating pillar of light. It all felt like a single coherent piece, despite the many small sections and the variety of styles that make it up. In keeping with the title, much of the music is bounding, athletic, youthful, with moments of quieter reflection and suggested loss.

Here is the composer's summary of his method, as printed in the program: "For hundreds of years, bards would travel the Aegean and sing from memory the 15,693 lines of the Iliad. Each time the story might change a little bit depending on the bard's surroundings and memory. With thousands of years between us and then, uncountable waves on the shore, a speckling across the universe of momentary loves and victories and breakfasts and hands running through hair, I wonder what the Iliad in which I find myself  might look like – evolved in some cases like fish on land and in others torn asunder like the endless reconfiguration of the continents, or perhaps transformed like the green Sahara only 10,000 years ago. These are the days I've grown up in – from the divine intervention in a walk-off home run to the rivergods in the Hudson to the soft breathing of someone sleeping beneath the window." That describes the effect of the piece very well: epic in sweep but intimate in detail, filled with personal moments that might or might not resonate with your moments, but in either case slip away or return reconfigured (so perhaps live performance, with its elusive attempts by the listener to hold each moment, and its inevitable disappearance into selective and hazy memory, really is the best medium for this piece).

The composer was there and took a bow afterwards, after we had applauded the dazzling and intrepid Supové. He wore black pants and a reddish shirt, with his frizzy auburn hair tied back. He looked very pleased, as indeed he had every right to be. There was a question-and-answer session after the concert, for which I did not stay. Later I kind of regretted this, but since it was late on a Friday night after a work week I was very tired. I don't always enjoy Q and A sessions anyway; I generally prefer letting myself marinate in memories of the performance as long as I can before forced re-entry into the usual world.

As a Fowl: Music by Kyle Hovatter at the Center for New Music

Last Friday I finally made it out to the Center for New Music. I had wanted to visit the venue for quite a while, though I’ll admit I was shocked when I was told it had been open for two years – tempus does indeed keep fugit-ing. Speaking of which, I had to kill time before the concert  started at 7:30, which is kind of difficult to do now that there are no more book stores and no more CD stores. Even though for me going into those places is like (fill in this space with your favorite addiction/substance abuser comparison), still, it’s a pleasant way to while away some time, as opposed to what I actually ended up doing, which was first going through Macy’s, where I felt strange horrors and unnameable sorrows, without even the consolation of ending up in Holiday Lane, which frankly is nowhere near ready. At this rate I don’t see how they’re going to manage to start selling Christmas decorations by mid-September. Disgraceful. Having had my fill there, I then went to the Westfield Mall, where they were filming the latest YA dystopian novel – or it was just business as usual; it’s hard to tell there.

Once you're buzzed inside the Center for New Music, it's almost surprising to walk in from one of the Tenderloin's less distinguished blocks to a well-proportioned and comfortable space. There was a sort of lounge off to the front, and a long concert space with clean white walls, backed with an irregular wall of bricks worn by time into beauty. During the intermission I noticed at least one woman walk back there just to put her hands on the brick. She told me she wanted to see if they were real.

The concert was an evening of new music by local composer Kyle Hovatter. I had never heard his elegant and inventive music before, but I had heard some of the performers: the Jarring Sounds duo (mezzo-soprano – oddly listed as a soprano in Friday's program – Danielle Reutter-Harrah and lutenist/guitarist/theorboist Adam Cockerham) and I was glad to hear some performers new to me, soprano Amy Foote, pianist Ian Scarfe, and bassoonist Alexis Luque. Hovatter worked the computer for pieces that used pre-recorded tracks, like the first piece, En Los Bosques, for bassoon and pre-recorded audio, inspired by a poem by Neruda ("Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig. . . "). The track was more interesting than such things often are, combining spoken word, natural sounds, and musical instruments, accompanied by Luque on bassoon, bringing out intimations of that instrument's Pieter Bruegel quality. That was followed by Plum Green, for bassoon and piano (Luque on bassoon and Ian Scarfe on piano). The idea here was to move from one color to the next; plum was more percussive and green more lyrical. Though the reference is to colors I couldn't help also thinking of green plums ripening, and natural scenes, particularly bird song, as well as poetry seem to inspire a lot of Hovatter's music, though that may make it sound more ethereal than it is; the earth and earthiness are also part of Nature.

Hovatter introduced the next selection, a setting of four poems by T E Hulme, a young critic turned poet and then killed in the trenches of World War I. The poems and the settings are brief, elliptical, and compelling. (The program's title, As a Fowl, is taken from one of these poems.) The Jarring Sounds duo performed these; I had heard them in baroque music so it was interesting to hear their other specialty, contemporary works; it's also interesting to hear modern works for the theorbo. While they were arranging stands and stools Cockerham gave a brief yet thorough explanation of what the theorbo was (a member of the lute family: see the rounded back) and why its neck is so long (it has extra strings for added bass, and string technology at the time required the length). I am not a big fan of concert-time chat but I actually found this sort of technical explanation really fascinating and helpful. There was an intermission after this piece, which was unnecessary, I thought, but the composer's wife had thoughtfully baked cookies and brownies for us, which I ate too many of, so I can't really complain.

After the break the first piece was There Will Come Soft Rains for soprano Amy Foote and pre-recorded track. It's a setting of the poem of that name by Sara Teasdale. In his intro Hovatter put the poem in a Cold War/post-atomic bomb setting, which was an interesting view, but it also relates to the Hulme poems we heard earlier, since she wrote it in response to the slaughter on the battlefields of World War I. He also mentioned working on this piece with Foote, and explained that it arose from their mutual love of birds, so instead of a linear setting of the text the words are broken and patterned like bird-song. Foote appropriately wore peacock-feather earrings. (I have to agree: bird-song is one of the wonders of the world, even the cawing of crows; conversely, is there a stupider, more annoying sound in Nature than a dog barking? Dogs are the car alarms of the animal world. This bit is prompted by the horrifying sight of several people actually walking their dogs in the Westfield Mall. What a nightmare that place can be.)

That was followed by the Jarring Sounds performing Azulao, a mournful Brazilian love song, with Cockerham on lute this time. It involves sending a bluebird as messenger to the speaker's "ungrateful love," so the bird theme continues. The finale brought all the performers (except the pianist, who only played the one piece) back on stage for Three Poems by Elinor Wylie. Hovatter opened the piece by saying he sort of identified with Wylie, in that she was also out of step with her time (which was 1885 to 1928) and maybe took herself a bit too seriously. It was kind of a funny and slightly alarming personal revelation. The three poems were the epigrammatic and anti-social The Eagle and the Mole (Hovatter's setting really brought out the poem, which can seem a bit too heavily end-stopped when read on its own), Atavism, another view of Nature, and a brief, caustic excerpt from Village Mystery. In these pieces I felt that Foote was a bit too loud for the space, and her voice sometimes pressed into glassiness, but on the whole it was another excellent performance. Really enjoyable evening. After the applause we ate more cookies.