The oldest piece on the program is by Stockhausen himself: Kreuzspiel, a work for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, and percussion. It is a landmark composition for late-20th-century music, owing to certain principles of serial composition found within it. Its name, which means “Crossplay,” concerns the fact that different musical lines move in crisscrossing directions across various registers of pitches.
The two pieces from the mid-1970s are Schattenblätter, a trio by the Swiss composer Klaus Huber, and another trio by the American composer Anthony Braxton. The word Schattenblätter, or “shade leaves,” is a botanical term for leaves that grow in the shade rather than in the sun. Huber’s piece similarly lurks in a shadowy musical underbelly of sparse textures and highly differentiated instrumental parts. Huber describes that in his piece, “extreme isolation” becomes “audibly expressive.”
Huber also writes that his ascetic piece might remind people about prisoners of conscience. Braxton’s Composition No. 75, meanwhile, tests boundaries between musical freedom and restriction. Within it, the composer incorporates both strict notation and free improvisation.
The three pieces from this year include Intuition, a work for alto flute and percussion by Christopher Jones. Jones describes that within the work simple musical ideas evolve through “reiteration, transformation, disappearance, and reemergence.” The composition is named after a piece of visual art: an empty, wooden box that the artist, Joseph Beuys, intended for people to fill with their own personal thoughts. Similarly, Jones’ piece is a receptacle for musical ideas that individual performers personalize.
Next, Planetary is a work for oboe, clarinet, and saxophone by Christopher Burns, a Milwaukee composer. The movement of the cosmos inspired its musical processes. Just as moons orbit planets while those same planets orbit the sun, so too do the musical ideas in this piece evolve by rotating around each other at various speeds and on multiple levels.
Alongside Planetary, this concert will also premiere David Bithell’s temporary structures. Here, the simple idea of alternation is at play. Like the rotations in Planetary, this alternation happens on multiple levels: between individual instruments, and between groups of them. Further, Bithell describes that, over time, “Instrumental motives become more subdued and inhabit a narrower range,” so that the structure of the whole piece assumes the shape of a diminuendo.
Even though this concert and these pieces can be described in terms of evolution, this upcoming concert will also speak to the current state of the Bay Area’s contemporary music scene. That state, judging by this sfSound program, promises to be both appealing and advanced.