Composer Gabriella Smith loves receiving one particular postconcert comment, she revealed in a recent interview with SF Classical Voice.
“My favorite reaction is, ‘I wasn’t expecting that,’” she explained with a laugh. “I feel successful when I hear that.”
Now, surprising an audience is a good thing. Confusing or bewildering your musicians is not, and that’s why it’s helpful for a composer to write for players she knows and trusts — artists who have cultivated an understanding of her music and her process of creating it.
Happily, Smith has just that sort of relationship with yMusic. The six-piece ensemble is preparing for the world premiere of her latest work, Aquatic Ecology, on March 8 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Playhouse and on March 10 at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara.
Founded in 2008, yMusic specializes in “normal instruments being used in slightly unconventional ways,” said cellist and member Gabriel Cabezas. “The six of us have worked in a lot of different styles of music over the years. There are sounds we are accustomed to hearing or making that take us a little bit outside of preconceived notions [of a classically trained ensemble].
“Gabriella’s music often involves extended techniques or textural sounds that are slightly off the beaten path. There are overlapping waves of material. Those are all things we get excited about.
“For me and Gabriella at least, there is a feedback loop of influence,” Cabezas added. “She’s influenced by some of the stuff I do, but I discovered those things because I was trying to execute [parts of] her pieces. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing.”
“In a lot of ways, I’m influenced by my collaboration with yMusic — and with Gabe particularly,” said Smith. “I’ve also worked individually with Nadia [Sirota, the group’s violist] and C.J. [Camerieri, the trumpeter]. We all influence each other.”
Smith and Cabezas have been friends for 15 years. They were in the same class at the Curtis Institute of Music and were roommates in both Philadelphia and New York City. Cabezas was literally there as Smith was developing her style, which is grounded in minimalism but incorporates a wide range of influences.
“yMusic has always been about creating an artistic community and collaborating with friends,” Cabezas said. “When I joined [the ensemble] in 2014, I was excited to introduce the group to some of my friends, including Gabriella. We quickly looked for opportunities to commission [her].”
Smith wrote two pieces for the group between 2015 and 2017, both of which can be heard on YouTube: an energetic overture-type work called Tessellations and an eight-minute piece called Maré, the Portuguese word for “tide.”
“I wrote it on an island in Brazil when I was staying at an artists’ colony,” the composer recalled. “The tide affected our lives in a meaningful way. When it was in, it would come all the way up to the steps of [where we were staying]. When it was out, it left a huge expanse of beach. That was one of the first trips I brought my hydrophone on.”
Smith has utilized that piece of equipment to record underwater many times in the years since, and the sounds she’s picked up with it are a key component of Aquatic Ecology, an ambitious 40-minute-long work.
“It’s built around these recordings,” she said of the piece. “I use them as a way to help people better understand and feel a connection to the underwater world. A lot of people don’t even realize there are sounds down there.”
At times, Aquatic Ecology presents those sounds “raw” — which is to say, “you’re hearing what I was hearing when I made the recording,” Smith explained. “Imagine you’re sitting on a paddleboard in French Polynesia, as I was. Your hydrophone is underneath you, in the water. You have headphones on, and you’re listening as you record the sounds.”
In other parts of the piece, Smith has processed the sounds to incorporate them into her music. For example, there is “a species of fish that makes a humming sound to attract mates,” she said. In certain sections, she has incorporated that hum in its pure form, and in others, “I turn it into an instrument by pitch-shifting it.”
For still another section, “I took all the little shrimp crackles and the sound of parrotfish chewing the algae off coral and made that into a groove,” she said. “My music then enters in a similar groove.”
If that sounds a lot like Steve Reich’s seminal 1988 quartet Different Trains, in which the composer takes the rhythms of locomotives and the speech patterns of interviewees and turns those into music, you’ve got it. Smith adores that piece. Indeed, the Berkeley native was strongly influenced by the propulsive sounds of minimalism; as a teen, she was mentored by a local composer who contributed immensely to that tradition, John Adams.
That said, Smith’s influences are many and varied.
“I love Björk, Radiohead, J.S. Bach, Béla Bartók, Beethoven. Also early music, like William Byrd. The music of Kaija Saariaho was a huge influence on me. When I first heard her [solo cello piece Sept papillons], I was playing the violin in youth orchestras, and I thought, ‘This opens up a whole new world of things I can try on my violin.’ That was a big musical moment in my life.”
How did Smith find her voice as a composer? “It started to happen very quickly once I left the Bay Area and went to Curtis,” she recalled. “I was 17 to 20 [at the time], and I was really homesick for California. Its landscape and ecology became a part of my music [in a way] that it never was before.
“As a teenager, I spent a lot of time backpacking and hiking and working on a songbird research project. So all of that was an important part of my life but not of my music. I was writing absolute music, inspired by pieces I was listening to at the time, such as Bartók quartets.
“[At Curtis] I started to figure out who I was and what I cared about in and outside of music. I also started combining influences in a more deliberately broad way. If you’re only listening to Bartók, your music is going to sound like Bartók. If you’re listening to everything from William Byrd to Pink Floyd, you have an opportunity to combine those influences in a way that’s unique to you.”
No doubt many concertgoers, having read in their program notes that Smith’s music is usually inspired by nature, have then expected to hear soothing, tranquil sounds. That’s one major source of those surprise reactions that the composer enjoys so much.
“I’ve never thought of nature as calming,” she said. “On that songbird project, I spent a lot of time identifying birdsongs by ear. That process is really interesting, but it’s not relaxing.
“Plus, the Pacific Ocean in Northern California is extremely violent. I would not describe [being there] as a calming experience. Rather than sitting there and relaxing, you have to keep your eyes open [for the next rogue wave].”
Staying on your toes is something that fans of Smith’s music — and certainly the musicians who perform it — have come to expect. But the players of yMusic are more than ready. They’ve performed everything from thorny classical music to accompaniment for prestigious pop artists such as Paul Simon and Ben Folds.
“[Gabriella’s] influences are so broad that the chances that one of the six of us is going to be able to figure it out are quite good,” Cabezas said. It helps that Smith is writing into the musicians’ strengths as well.
“I went into this piece with the knowledge that I wanted to let people experience the field recordings [I made underwater],” she said. “But I also wanted to write for this group of people I really love working with.”
