San Francisco Classical Voice

Ursula Mamlok

Last Monday in the final concert of its twenty-eighth season, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players managed to prove that less can be more. It was a program of works by women composers, three of whom were present.

Thea Musgrave's Impromptu No. 1(1967) for flute and oboe, the shortest and least ambitious of the evening's five works, proved the most rewarding and attractive. Performed with great panache by the marvelous Tod Brody and oboist Marilyn Coyne, Musgrave's work is a witty and engaging dialog between two highly articulate and good-humored equals. Its cascading opening is contrasted with sustained music featuring artful echoing of the instruments' top notes. The opening cascading music keeps returning as a kind of refrain, often followed by a unison response (very nicely in tune in this performance). The ending of this brief work, bubbly counterpoint spilling over into a low unison, was particularly effective.

Ursula Mamlok's Sextet(1977), for flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, bass and piano, is a succinct, three-movement work with moments of great beauty and subtlety. Particularly striking is the mercurial third movement which unfolded inexorably in this exciting performance, its imitative figures passed back and forth with precision and drive. The first movement features the juxtaposition of short, rapid ostinati with brief highly expressive lyric passages. Violinist Heidi Wilcox made the most of this opportunity, dispatching her solos with Viennese lilt. The still, Webernian middle movement featured pianist Thomas Schultz and bassist Jon Lancelle who should be lauded outstanding for their sensitivity and dynamic control. Music Director Donald Palma led the committed performance.

Brevity and wit were in short supply during the rest of the evening. The absolute low point was Julia Wolfe's Girlfriend (1998) for amplified flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, keyboard, and tape. This twenty-two minute monstrosity, featuring a tape of the same car crash sound effects (squealing tires and the smashing metal) endlessly and maddeningly repeated, was an all-out assault on the audience and on the unfortunate performers alike.

It was difficult not to feel held hostage for there was no way of knowing when the assault would end. From the beginning of the second part, featuring intensified car crash sounds, different long tones in the instruments and a relentlessly repeated single note in the vibes, Girlfriend slowly and predictably gets higher, louder and denser. My sneaking suspicion that things would get loud beyond all tolerance was fulfilled, but this was not to happen for some time.

With the help of a click track, the conductor is able to bring things to grinding and arbitrary halts with great precision. This feature was utilized with numbing regularity, doing little but adding endless minutes to the proceedings. Wolfe's program notes read in their entirety, "It's a state of mind." Other than marveling that one so evidently musically illiterate can actually achieve correct usage of the apostrophe, I can only be grateful that most of us do not share her mental state--as witness the woman seated behind me who expressed her distaste for such sophomoric posturing in the form of lusty booing.

I come away from an experience like this wondering why the composer finds it necessary to expend so much time and energy in trying to shock the audience. Have we become so jaded that we mistake nose-thumbing as originality?

The concert began with Sofia Gubaidulina's Ten Preludes (1974), a work for solo cello played by Stephen Harrison. In spite of the convincing performance, I found the piece generic and undistinguished. Each prelude is conceived as an investigation of a different string technique, such as muted vs. unmuted playing, harmonics, thrown bows (dropping the bow on the strings producing rapidly repeated notes), sul ponticello (playing near the bridge), sul tasto (playing on the fingerboard), playing at the point of the bow, or playing at the frog (the heavier bottom of the bow). The problem is that these investigations rarely transcend the techniques themselves to become music.

Predictably, the first two preludes, staccato-legato and legato-staccato, are mirrored by preludes eight, arco-pizzicato, and nine, pizzicato-arco. Beware of symmetry! Prelude nine has a rather aimless tune whose one nice moment is spoiled by an entirely gratuitous glissando up the harmonic series. This kind of reliance on instrumental effects over substance wears very thin very quickly. Mercifully, most of the preludes are short.

The concert closer, Sheree Clement's one movement Chamber Concerto(1982) in its West Coast premiere, has numerous striking moments. Among them were an expressive violin and viola duet beautifully played by Heidi Wilcox and violist Nancy Ellis, a piccolo solo accompanied only by tom-toms played with the hands, and, near the end, widely spaced very soft ensemble chords over which a solo violin sweetly intoned. The fifteen players, including two percussionists, were used in imaginative and skillful ways.

The Chamber Concerto is an impressive piece, but its young composer had not yet transcended the influence of her major teacher, Mario Davidovsky whose highly recognizable fingerprints are all over the score. In this performance, at least, I missed a sense of inevitability -- why did this particular event happen at this particular time? The structure of the piece seemed a bit muddled at times, as if the composer wasn't sure just how to proceed. Nevertheless, I would like to hear more from this highly talented composer. That a composer of such talent goes begging for work while Julia Wolfe is a smashing success speaks volumes about the decline of our musical civilization.

((Composer Ross Bauer teaches at U.C. Davis where he directs Empyrean Ensemble)

©1999 Ross Bauer, all rights reserved