For this year’s edition of San Francisco Performances’ PIVOT Festival, composer and singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane returned as curator. He chose evening-length works for two of the festival’s three nights, Jan. 29–31 at Herbst Theatre, and brought along a handful of collaborators: composer, violinist, and vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx with the brass quartet The Westerlies, and Sandbox Percussion.
Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths, which opened the festival on Wednesday, is an elaboration of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an illustrated alphabet book that sets forth the sometimes horrid, always droll deaths of 26 children. “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears.” Gashlycrumb continues in this vein, one sentence per child.
With 26 Little Deaths, Kihlstedt goes far beyond Gorey’s spare prose, creating a unique sound world for each demise and, for 20 of the children, writing lyrics that expand on their deaths. She composed the work for herself (vocals and violin) and a large ensemble, which at Herbst included pianist Sarah Cahill, San Francisco’s Del Sol Quartet, the four Sandbox Percussion players, trumpeter Caleb Brosnac, trombonist Miriam Snyder, clarinetist Jason Wilcox, flutist Beneditto Caroc, and bassist Carlos Valdez.
Kihlstedt had help with this project; friends contributed arrangements for nine of the movements, though the sonic and stylistic variety of 26 Little Deaths is such that you’d be hard pressed to tell which. The composer did note from the stage that she did “all the really weird ones.” Charmingly, one movement is based on a temper tantrum thrown by her young son, and with his permission, she incorporated his words and melodies into “S is for Susan who perished of fits.”
Kihlstedt’s free-form lyrics are morbid, poetic, funny, grim, and puckish — very much in the spirit of Gorey’s originals. I could hear laughter all around Herbst during the performance.
Her titles for each movement are similarly hilarious. For Basil (and the bears), the title is “Childhood Friends,” and the first of the two verses goes, “So soft your fur. / How gentle your purr. / You are smiling at me. / You’re my friend, I can see, aren’t you?” James, who swallowed lye, sings, “This one, I really don’t know what it does. / The only way to tell is to / DRINK IT, I’LL SEE!!”
The composer’s wit extends to the musical settings, which encompass a vast number of vernacular styles from the last 150 years: a waltz, the blues, ragtime, something resembling a Scottish folk song, American big-band music, a ballad, 1920s Broadway, and more. The arrangements are just as clever and varied, using all manner of instrumental combinations and techniques. The pieces vary in length, from perhaps 45 seconds for Amy to four or five minutes for the longest.
Kihlstedt was front and center for the entire performance, singing and playing the violin, often at the same time and always virtuosically. Kahane conducted, but so discreetly you simply forgot he was there. 26 Little Deaths is a marvelous cornucopia, one that keeps the listener absorbed, delighted, and charmed.
The next night, Jan. 30, saw Heynderickx and The Westerlies take the stage. This reviewer has little familiarity with current folk idioms and thus feels unqualified to comment on Heynderickx’s songs. She’s a fine guitarist, and The Westerlies are a marvelous group, playing excellent arrangements beautifully, in collaboration with Heynderickx and never overwhelming her. The audience was clearly devoted to her.
Closing the festival on Friday was a performance of Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars, a cornucopia of a different type, a tightly structured 90-minute display of just how much variety four percussionists can create with an array of pitched and unpitched instruments. The members of Sandbox Percussion, for whom the piece was written, gave an awesome display of musicianship and technique.
Seven Pillars consists of 11 movements, including four solo movements, one for each member of the group: Ian Rosenbaum, Terry Sweeney, Jonny Allen, and Victor Caccese. The whole quartet plays for the titular pillars, and each movement introduces a new instrument, which is then folded into all of the subsequent sections.
Seven Pillars is so complex that it’s nearly impossible to track everything that’s happening, even within a short section of the work. Each player has multiple instruments under his control. Rhythms overlay and interact with each other. Contrasting timbres jump out of the texture. The music is often very loud.
Just when you think your ears might be overwhelmed, new timbres and new rhythms come into play. The resonant vibraphone in the first solo succeeds the drier percussion instruments of “Pillar I.” The eerie sounds of bowed percussion, the woody sweetness of marimba, and an unconventional approach to mallet instruments (played with the hands) follow in later movements. Tempos compress or elongate. The volume shifts. Science-fiction film scores might have birthed some of this music, but the art of change ringing could have, too.
Beyond the score, Seven Pillars calls for an elaborate staging, incorporating seven tubular lamps that reflect the music by changing color and displaying different patterns. During the performance, the percussionists move the lamps into various configurations and also wheel around instruments that others are playing. Michael Joseph McQuilken’s stage direction and lighting design deserve lots of credit for their intensely dramatic effect.
Seven Pillars is as much a theatrical work as a musical one, and that’s fitting given the constant motion and sheer physicality involved in playing percussion. You can only imagine how long the piece took to learn, especially since Sandbox performs it from memory.
