Literally Surrounded by Sound

A Crimson Grail was premiered at the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, having been commissioned by the city of Paris. Rhys Chatham’s piece consciously makes use of the architecture’s 15-second reverberation time. The musicians surround the audience, creating a live, surround-sound experience. The Paris-based Chatham wrote the piece for a variable number of electric guitarists and bassists (astonishingly, up to 400), plus a single percussionist. The Nonesuch recording captures the work’s Lincoln Center performance.

When I heard that the piece involves a variable number of musicians, and that many, and called for a 15-second reverb, at first I thought this has to be ambient music. Calling it such, though, is far from accurate. Instead, Chatham takes large groups and has effects passed around, motives handed off, and sound clusters moving. The piece is carefully constructed throughout; each sound evolves in time throughout the work, and clearly the structure is seriously considered. As you sit listening to this piece, it slowly opens up its doors of harmonic revelation and intensity. Rarely, if ever, does the slow-moving texture feel stagnant.

Chatham has composed works like this before. Many of his pieces deal with a gradual development over long periods, and employ large groups of instruments (particularly guitars). In concept, this kind of work reminds me very much of the recent Julia Wolfe release, Music in Multiples, but, in effect, it’s quite different. While both deal with the concepts of multiple instruments creating a mass of sound, where Wolfe’s is aggressive and “in-your-face” from start to finish, Chatham makes this almost seem like an ambient piece. Only through listening do you realize that it has a strong, vibrant, and clear narrative arc. This piece is truly an interesting and new take on slowly evolving sound-masses, and also a new version of what I might call “nonambient ambient” music.

More than anything, this CD gave me a strong desire to hear A Crimson Grail piece live. Imagine the experience of being surrounded by hundreds of musicians, and hearing ideas and motives passed all around you. However, that does make me wonder about the CD. This is probably the best way we’ll ever hear Chatham without being present at a live performance, but it must pale in comparison, since so much of this piece seems to be about the surround sound, about the power of a mass of humanity working together. Witnessing that would be spectacular.

Many compositional innovators have to face this challenge in their own way, as performance art, dramatic staging, and the like simply don’t work on a CD or an MP3 download. Even performances on DVD give merely an approximation of the real experience, more so than recordings of, say, a Brahms symphony might. This Chatham work stands up particularly well in this regard, for even without his extensions on a modern performance experience, the piece sounds tremendous and well-constructed throughout. The careful thought put into each sound, and the manner in which so many musicians could work together, makes this a work of art, in its truest sense.