SFCMP Zone 5: in which discussing a plan leads to some confusion
Artistic director Steven Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) concluded their fortieth season with a program featuring a broad mix of new music. Everything from pure electronics to solo viola was represented. One is struck by both the diversity of programming and the highly polished performance presented by SFCMP. Unfortunately I missed the pre-concert discussion, but in catching the tail end of it I noticed that all the composers represented on the program were present, and they were discussing their music and new music in general with Schick.
Aaron Gervais’s piece Culture No. 1 began with a short sample played by pianist Karen Rosenak on a laptop. The less-than-5-seconds clip was the inspiration for the following section of music. This “call and response” between short audio clips and music based around and inspired by them continued throughout the piece a total of five times. Each of the samples, according to the program note, was found “left over” from other projects on the composer’s hard drive. The piece was about 9 minutes long, and is, to the best of my knowledge and a recent google search, the only piece currently in the repertoire for piano and harp. Through delicate amplification of Karen Gottlieb’s harp, the balance was worked out quite satisfactorily.
Violist Nancy Severance performed Australian composer Brett Dean’s Intimate Decisions (1996), which was ten minutes of beautiful viola writing (not to mention playing!). The title comes from one of Dean’s wife’s paintings, and the character of the piece holds true to Dean’s experience writing for a solo stringed instrument, which his program note compares to writing a personal letter or having an intense discussion with a friend. Dean himself is a professional violist, and premiered the work himself even though it was commissioned by his colleague Walter Küssner. Perhaps because of the composer’s intimate knowledge of the instrument he was writing for, Intimate Decisions hold true to the title: the solo viola at times seemed to have a quite conversation with itself.
Brett Dean – Photo by Mark Coulson
Last March, and for two nights only, Brooklyn Village was performed in Downtown Brooklyn. Advertised as a “multimedia spectacular,” the show took the audience on a time travel to honor the cultural heritage of Downtown Brooklyn, and showcased the trifecta of what some people call Brooklyn’s cultural renaissance: the newly “rebooted” Brooklyn Phil, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (BYC) and Roulette.
One would think that music and spoken word are two of the most complimentary art forms. They seem like they should be a perfect match; next to music, spoken word is the medium most reliant on pitch and rhythm, not to mention abstract concepts like cadence, consonance and dissonance. But the combination is a risky endeavor. One often hears music/spoken word collaborations that serve to diminish both components, with each distracting from the other, interfering with each other as opposed to providing contrast or counterpoint. But if there is a musical entity that could successfully marry the two, it’s Kronos Quartet, whose experience working in unusual musical settings is as wide as anyone’s. Working with authors Rula Jebreal, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony Kushner, they brought their experimental energies to the Metropolitan Museum for an evening-length work titled “Exit Strategies”.
The concluding concert in Composers Inc.’s season took place on April 24 at San Francisco’s Old First Presbyterian Church. Unusually for such an off day, the audience was quite sizable, and included all six composers whose music was being performed that night. The concert began with Eric Chasalow’s set of songs using texts by Anne Sexton, called The Furies. Each movement explored the fury of a new idea, and new kind of fury. The depth of emotion was palpable, and the tape (yes, tape: spliced, cut with a razor blade, sounds generated by test oscillators!) part balanced well with Deborah Norin-Kuehn’s soprano. Chasalow, who flew in from Massachusetts where he teaches at Brandeis University, gives the electro-acoustic elements of his composition a lyrical quality, and adapts them to fit the distinct moods of each song. The first song, The Fury of Beautiful Bones, was quite intense, followed quickly by a calmer but just as intense Fury of Sopranos and Guitars, next there was The Fury of Cooks, which was a rather funnier sort of fury, and ended with the psychotic Fury of Hating Eyes, which almost seems to recount the narrator’s descent into madness.
You might credit Leonard Berstein for inspiring this CD, who described the “many-sidedness” of American music in his 