By definition, contemporaneity is an integral component of new music. But contemporary circumstances obviously engulf more than musical concerns: From war to the environment to the financial crisis, there are plenty of present-day issues that have nothing to do with music. But this is not to say that contemporary music cannot reflect on these social issues.
Precisely such reflection is the theme for the seventh season of BluePrint, a new-music concert series directed by Nicole Paiement at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The title for BluePrint's current season is "The Urgency of Now: Lending an Ear to Burning Issues." Saturday night's installment was called "Transparent Walls." Both directly and indirectly, the pieces on this program questioned the interconnectedness of life.
For example, by bringing the issue of environmental destruction to the fore, the opening piece pondered the loss of life that can result from such interconnectedness. It was titled
Requies Ranarum, a piece for chamber ensemble, soprano, and electronics, by Philip Collins. The piece is not structured like a Catholic Requiem, but modeled instead after Protestant memorial services. It is, in fact, an elegy for eight extinct frog species. Collins was inspired to write the piece on hearing a Smithsonian recording of North American frog sounds, in part because the musical variety of these sounds offered fertile material for electroacoustic manipulation.
But Collins, a self-proclaimed lover of amphibians, also included a soprano part within
Requies Ranarum, whose text consists exclusively of the Latin names for extinct species of frogs. The piece's instrumental parts both imitated the recorded frog sounds and created soundscapes that evoked their habitats. For example, in one movement that explicitly featured sounds of frogs in danger or distress, the instrumentalists created a foreboding atmosphere that culminated with foot-stomping: the sound of humans literally and ominously encroaching on the frogs. Saturday night's performance was the premiere of this piece's third version, a version that both Collins and the audience deemed successful.
Anguishing Questions
Whereas
Requies Ranarum dealt with the destruction of wildlife, the evening's final piece,
Midday Prayers, by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, seemed to question the destruction of human life. The work belongs within a four-part cycle, called
Life Without Christmas. It is scored for 19 instruments, a solo clarinet, and a boy's voice, which was performed on Saturday by a female soprano. Both the clarinetist and the vocalist performed from balconies. The instrumental parts on stage, meanwhile, created what Kancheli describes as a "sound-world of anguish and desolation." This sound-world largely consists of layered, sustained pitches played without vibrato. Near the end of the piece, the vocalist finally enters to sing two lines drawn from the Passion of Christ: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." There may have been ephemeral moments of epiphany or transfiguration in this music, but the overall effect was one of overwhelming loss and despair.
The inner two pieces on this program were existential ruminations translated into music. The first,
YX Unsquared, by Young-Shin Choi, is the product of the composer's ongoing attempt to find his own compositional voice in the interrelation of his Korean and Western cultural backgrounds. It uses Western instruments, but attempts to replicate a Korean technique called
nonghyon, a term that means wavering pitch. The piece also features asymmetric rhythms — hence the "unsquared" of its title. In some ways, the piece's rhythmically distinct layers and subtle melodic fluctuations evoke techniques of minimalism, but
YX Unsquared also elicits a swaying, immediate dynamism that is distinctly its own.
The title of Aleksandra Vrebalov's piece provided the entire program with its name: "Transparent Walls." This work was commissioned by San Francisco Conservatory, and Saturday's performance was also its premiere. Vrebalov, a Serbian-American composer, likens the cello part of her work to an individual seeking order and meaning in the interrelatedness of everything, an interrelatedness that is obscure yet discernible.
This piece also includes winds, brass, and percussion. These other parts interact with the cello line in ways that seem at times intentional, at times coincidental. The resultant mosaic of motivic connections culminates with what sounds like shrieking sirens. Following this climax is stillness — albeit stillness that is perhaps more charged with apprehension than with tranquility. "Transparent Walls" surely conveyed what the composer described as a "moment of disturbing realization."
In the end, the entire "Transparent Walls" program did indeed entertain urgent "burning issues," issues both social and musical. But all these issues were given voice only through eloquent musical execution. From programming to performance, this concert series is persuasive indeed. Its upcoming installment on March 7 is highly recommended.