The new Bridge Records release of Steven Mackey’s Memoir foregrounds the multidimensional pleasures of a compelling narrative woven into a vibrant musical fabric. Mackey’s album-length score is a narrative portrait of his mother: personal — indeed, based on her own written recollections — as she traverses universal social and psychological tribulations of the past century.
The album succeeds thanks to Natalie Christa Rakes’s shining voice-acting and the unflagging beauty of sonorities from the arx duo (percussion), and the Dover Quartet (strings). The naturally balanced, intimate acoustic fits Mackey’s supportive musical setting. The story is the thing — not as voiceover or song. The piece maintains the informality and unguarded chattiness of a confessional friend. Uprooting is a continual theme, from immigration, innocence, relationships, and dependence, to constant resettling around the world. But never is Elaine Mackey uprooted from her feeling for music or her folksy superstitions, and, in a fusion of arts, never is the story uprooted by musical spotlighting. The disciplined deployment of six musicians and the repetition of melodic and rhythmic motifs provide layered continuities to the score, clarifying the succession of life-scenes. The score often skips lightly in childlike rhythms set in variations of stark instrumental interjections followed by subtly shaded blends of percussion and strings.
Rakes has a great way with that particularly Scandinavian-American wide-eyed openness and wariness one might associate with Lake Wobegon. For all her worldlines, Elaine Mackey’s main motivation is often her fear of embarrassment. In a faithful reflection of this personality, the composer’s simple and optimistic musical idiom sustains the narration until drama builds over conflicts with liquids: ocean crossings, swimming mishaps, and cocktail glasses.
Mackey’s tonally placid compositional idiom wiggles our ears with lively textures. But the tone painting, such as the blur of machines and typewriters, sometimes quickens the pace into near-melodrama. Rakes also accentuates machine-age staccato when needed. Memoir is 75 minutes long, but it doesn’t demand listening in a single stretch. This is suitable chapter-by-chapter streaming for a car ride, long walk, or fireside drama. The considerable expressive talents of the Dover String Quartet reveal themselves best in key dramatic inflections, such as the intensely beautiful cello solo in “Tacos,” and the violin as the story reaches “Rock Bottom.” In such a deeply personal story for the composer, it is refreshing to hear Mackey speak his own perspective at times, and to learn that his trademark long hair has roots in the family story. Neither haircut nor Memoir is long enough to cover the endless joy and sensitivity of the composer’s big ears for sonorities.
Memoir affirms the genre-transcending fascination of both narrative and music: inhabiting another’s emotional and sonic world. The new release takes a place in contemporary “concert” music’s intensifying search for a proper role in the fusion of arts in media — like Elaine Mackey—an adventurous, globe-trotting daughter of immigrants.