Carolyn Chen allows for realism to permeate her work. Even in the acoustic sections of her string quartet Other Forests, performed by the Koan Quartet for Tuesdays @ Monk Space on Dec. 17, the expression has an immediacy, a rickety loudness that reminds me of skin under a band-aid that’s just been peeled off.
This realism is most evident in her usage of text. She often incorporates quotidian fact among music and poetry, as we heard in her bass-flute solo breathe out clouds, when out of the mist of Hildegard von Bingen fragments came a literal explanation of the process of condensation. My companion observed that this combination, poetic and ordinary, allows for a heightened perception of the ordinary.
It also helps that Chen is very funny. Her piece How to assemble a is a text piece in which six speakers read six different sets of instructions for vastly different products. A bicycle. A saxophone. A cake. A disaster kit. Along with the slippery overlapping of these disparate instructions, the group did a sort of movement game, shuffling and reshuffling into various configurations. They eventually clumped up together and it occurred to me that the silly situation made up by their bodies represented well the way that physicality seems integral to Chen’s work, even when no obvious physical gesture or choreography exists.
Coming after an intermission, Other Forests was the monolith of the evening. It is a quartet augmented by recordings of found sound and the use of audio transducers placed on the instruments of the quartet (turning the instruments themselves into speakers). The conventional music played by the quartet was reminiscent of a curious yet melancholy journey through an ever-changing wood. At times a strident plaint, at others, worn meandering, sporting a tender injury.
Still, Chen’s humor found its way through the bracken. Four of the speakers surrounding the quartet were costumed by these papier-mâché bird sculptures with phonograph bells for beaks. Many of the recordings of friends which littered the end of the work included odd factoids about peeing around trees and Russian folktales.
In the latter portion of Other Forests, Chen extended the sound world out over the audience. With the simple use of audience plants and smartphones, she populated her forest with chattering birds, these recordings of friends explaining real and imaginary trees. With this rolled out what sounded like thick rain, but perhaps was just the sound of tires crunching over asphalt. Spatialized sound like this is not uncommon now, but it was incredible to feel so gently covered by it.
Flutist Christine Tavolacci performed Chen’s bass flute solo breathe out clouds. In between recitations of shuffled and reshuffled text of Hildegard von Bingen’s Antiphon no. 44, Tavolacci played melodies with counterpoint from her own voice, singing and playing at the same time. The interaction of the soundwaves between the played pitch and the sung pitch will rattle at different frequencies, adding resistance to the easily floating bass flute sound.
It’s a long piece, at points I wondered if it was too long. Listening to it I had the distinct feeling of walking around a gallery. The piece’s narrative arc is gradual and slight, the experience mostly like reading a small information panel next to a painting, and then, informed, taking in the visual. Perhaps not a form for everybody, but I was eventually lulled into its logic.
All of Chen’s works last night had some tether to the physical reality of the space and the performers. Even the concert’s opener, a three-part round called Momentum, represented this. Somehow, just singing in staggered entries made the act of making this music a tangible act, an act of mental flexibility, a sonic but very real game. I was not transported by Chen’s music, because I didn’t have to be — the reality of the here and now is folded in, and made remarkable.
The Tuesdays @ Monk Space series is presented by Brightwork newmusic, a nonprofit arts organization founded by pianist Aron Kallay.
