“Things Fall From the Sky” was the theme of Monday’s concert, yet nary a clunker of a composition felled the good spirits of San Francisco Contemporary Music Players attendees. A refreshing eclecticism replaced SFCMP’s usual emphasis on neomodernist and spectralist genres. Instead, four of the five numbers displayed neotonal, jazz-inflected, or indescribably admixed styles to keep Herbst Theatre patrons entertained.
The program began with the sole problematic number, Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells for New Orleans, a premiere, as the composer put it, “for the people who suffered and continue to suffer through the horrors of the devastating Hurricane Katrina.” Instead of something more ceremonial like tubular bells, however, Mitchell inexplicably chose the glockenspiel to assuage the victims. I can’t imagine a more difficult instrument to convey solemnity, other than the piccolo or the kazoo. Nor did the atonal, academic style over the seven-minute duration bring the slightest bit of comfort, except perhaps to score-analyzers.
with weird, retuned frets
Fortunately, Mitchell redeemed himself with the third piece on the program, also a premiere: the ominously titled WR/C 2A Opus I, for saxophone (played by the composer) and percussion (faultlessly executed by William Winant). Like its title and the New Orleans opener, the work began with soporific abstractions, but 11 minutes in, rather than falling from the sky, it took off like a rocket ship in a highly stimulating frenzy of activity that left the audience panting even more than the players. Even before this explosion, though, I was impressed by Mitchell’s superb control of his instrument, ranging in tone from strident to mellow and everywhere in between. If he would consider cutting a bit out of the first half of WR/C 2A Opus I, it would be a barn-burner. He could then just call it Opus I.
Mitchell’s works sandwiched a 17-minute guitar piece by local In C icon Terry Riley. Eloquently performed by David Tanenbaum, Quando cosas malas caen del cielo (When bad things fall from the sky) has been performed around the world since its composition in 2003. Reflecting on the composer’s experiences during the time right before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s a tone poem of travail. Riley had participated in a protest march on Broad Street in Nevada City, had been arrested, and wrote the piece to satisfy a community-service option in lieu of a fine.
It’s played on a specially tuned National Steel guitar (see illustration), which was designed in the 1920s to increase loudness using metallic resonators, before electronic amplification took off. The first movement depicts the march; the second, jail despondency; the third, renewed commitment to peace; and the fourth, the tragedy of the titular “shock-and-awe” phase of the Iraq invasion. Tanenbaum described the movement as “a kind of passacaglia,” and it came across, thanks to his interpretation, as a deeply affecting essay on war’s murder from a distance.
A Plethora of Sonic Pleasures
What fell from the sky after intermission were dozens of surprise packages from grab bags packed by two Santas, Lee Hyla and Cindy Cox. First came Hyla’s 2007 Polish Folk Songs, which was inspired by a visit to the Galician resort of Zakopane at the base of the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland. Like the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski before him, the American Hyla absorbed the multiethnic music to be found there and recombined tunes and elements, allowing them, as he put it, “to bump heads as well as interact peacefully.” Hyla’s Songs, for violin, viola, cello, clarinet, bass clarinet, keyboards, and percussion, were splayed across what appeared to be three sections, all delightfully schizoid and postmodern.
The songs evinced squirts of Janáčeklike melody, Stravinskian L’Histoire du soldat sonorities and ostinatos, bagpipian drones, kletzmerian clarinets, bongos — you name it. Best of all were occasional interjections from an electronic keyboard. These were promenaded like the suddenly massive chords that erupt in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, when the fifth door is opened, but designed to sound like a pipsqueak harmonium. The piece was simply a hoot.
Cox’s socks were equally packed with goodies. Her En circulo (2008) was both a premiere and a commission from the SFCMP. The title refers to elements passed around the ensemble like multiple potatoes of varying temperatures. The work’s seeming five sections abounded in funky beats, night-music twitters, piano riffs, triple-time oompah-band evocations, drum rolls, blurts, and, again, occasional Stravinskian textures. Overall, Cox’s piece sounded as if Hyla had taken his meds and became a different person, while retaining his love for variety.
What a great second half this was. The theme of falling ended, not with doomsaying the end of the world, but with the “All fall down!” cry of Ring-Around-the-Rosy folks out on the grass enjoying a summer day’s blue sky.