I’ve been attending San Francisco Contemporary Music Players concerts since I was 11 years old — a quarter of the time it has been in existence. This group has commissioned works by such composers as Julia Wolfe, Fred Frith, John Adams, and even John Cage. It has recorded CDs of music by Edmund Campion, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman, among many others I listen to regularly, and yet it rarely comes up in conversation when I discuss the Bay Area new music scene. And that's a doozy of a mistake.
Monday night SFCMP presented an amazing concert, called “Tradition, Influence, Evolution.” The opening work was Du Yun’s Vicissitudes No. 1, which displayed beautiful orchestral timbres and colors, particularly in the wailing of the sax and the gorgeous combination of pizzicato high strings with high vibe and high notes on the piano. The piece began with a lot of group energy that bubbled with excitement before gradually slowing down, even while maintaining the tension. Finally, about halfway through the piece, David Tanenbaum walked on stage while playing a steel string guitar, invoking the mad energy from the beginning of the piece.
While the textures fascinated me, I was not completely sold on the piece’s structure, unlike my reactions to other works by Du Yun. It lacked cohesion, though the virtuosity of the players was incredibly effective. (I later learned from one of the players that this score was more fully notated than some of Du Yun’s other works.)
If Monday night had a watchword, it was color. Brian Current, a composer not heard of much in the States but an up-and-coming conductor/composer in Canada, was represented by Strata, an SFCMP commission. The word strata, of course, literally means layers, and the ensemble certainly brought that out. The piece opened with a section of heavy breathing from the winds, perhaps just a few seconds, but enough so that every sound that followed felt connected to that breath. The instruments then gradually (though not slowly) became more and more disparate and further apart, each evolving naturally from the breath, but in its own manner, layering in the “strata” of the title.
Shifting Sonic Colors
One of the coolest things that the Contemporary Music Players does is its Contemporary Insights series, held the day before the concert, in which you can see them rehearse a piece from the concert with the composer. You can ask questions and engage with the performers and the composer, as a fun little bit of prep work. I wish I had seen the rehearsal for Ronald Bruce Smith’s Four Movements, the second SFCMP commission of the evening. This piece, too, evoked some truly fascinating and rich musical colors, offsetting gradual changes with sudden and engaging shifts. While each movement felt cohesive, and I felt a strong arc over the course of the first three movements, the fourth stood out slightly. It seemed like an afterthought, especially after the third movement’s almost sublime conclusion.
Often, the final piece on any concert is reason enough to attend. Monday’s was the 1982 Horn Trio by György Ligeti, a piece that didn’t so much define its instrumentation as open it up to the future. Each of the four movements possesses some bizarre strain of beauty — the beauty of the almost awkward, of the almost perverse and almost exaggerated. Here it was executed marvelously by Roy Malan, Lawrence Ragent, and Julie Steinberg on violin, horn, and piano, respectively. The piece has already become a classic, and yet is still difficult to talk about in depth. The piano and violin frequently lock step in awkward rhythms and then phase out of sync, creating awesome polyrhythms (executed fantastically) while the horn soars around the other instruments. What Ligeti does better than anyone to this day is create structures that, when followed to their logical conclusion, fall apart, either because of the players (as the composer intends) or because of the instrument (as he also intends). He took the idea of process-music and put his compositions through processes that must break apart. The result is truly brilliant and beautiful.
Let us hope that the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players will not break apart, like Ligeti’s works. This ensemble has built a long history of excellence, and next year’s incoming director, Steve Schick, will likely take it to a new level.