'24-'25: Performance #7
Newness, with all its thrill and folly.
Performers:
Ensemble: American Composers Orchestra
Conductor: Mei-Ann Chen
Program:
New York Premiere of Michael Abels’ “Borders,” with Mak Grgić as soloist (Guitar)
World Premiere of Paul Novak’s “forest migrations”
World Premiere of Kebra-Seyoun Charles’ Bass Concerto, “Nightlife,” featuring the composer as soloist (Bass)
* * * intermission * * *
New York Premiere of Victoria Polevá’s “The Bell,” with Inbal Segev as soloist (Cello)
Curtis Stewart’s “Embrace,” the composer as soloist (Violin)
Position: Front row, far right (Zankel Hall)
Purpose/Intent/Questions: I’m always curious about new music, even knowing that I don’t always adore it. Already having a new opera on the schedule for this stay in the City, this seemed like a thematically appropriate addition to the week’s adventures.
How’d it go?
What is it about human psychology that makes so many of us love a “mystery bag?” Yes, of course there’s the prospect of finding something uniquely valuable, but even beyond that, quite a few of us like this sort of… controlled surprise. If you give me meaningful bounds for a set of possibilities, say, “gluten-free cupcakes,” the majority of the time I’ll be more excited by an unknown flavor than by the opportunity to choose for myself. What could it be? Chocolate? Sharp cheese and quince? Virgin mojito? Vanilla? Corn? The thrill of not knowing, perhaps coupled with the avoidance of unnecessary decision fatigue, is a delight to consider. Even the folly of an under-spiced snickerdoodle with too-sweet buttercream gets a boost to its joy factor when it’s a matter of chance, rather than the consequence of my silly non-chocolate choice.
New Music is not gluten-free cupcakes. In the classical world, contemporary composition has a reputation that leaves many happy to wait for others to sample start-up symphonies or up-and-coming chamber pieces, letting the poison pill of bad music cripple the over-eager rather than the patient, sensible patrons who hold off until a piece has lasted a few concerts, beyond its debut season, before purchasing a ticket to hear it performed.
Sometimes I identify with those folks. As much as I wish to be supportive of those who are trying to join the conversation, we’re often force-fed subpar commissions, sandwiched between the ancient, inviolate pieces of repertoire. Sometimes I hear a recording of a premiere, only to wish that I hadn’t. Because its name is new, I forget it quickly, I don’t know to avoid it when programs are published. It feels like if we aren’t wary, we will be made to endure a music that we certainly didn’t commission, that we didn’t ask for.
But that’s all the more reason that nights like this with the American Composers Orchestra are important. I’d never heard any of it before. It was all new to me, some of it new to everyone. I could go into it with the same attitude as sitting down for a set course menu at a restaurant I’ve never tried, featuring some alien cuisine. Even if I despised all of it, it was still part of the fun of trying something new.
Plus, if one of my favorite cellists is slated as a soloist, it can’t be a fully intolerable evening.
Can it…?
Let’s take it course by course, piece by piece.
Abels’ Borders:
If you’ve never heard of Michael Abels, that doesn’t mean you haven’t heard his music. He’s responsible for the scores of many films, including of major note, Jordan Peele’s horror-psychological-thriller-social-commentary-beyond-genre trifecta: Get Out, Us, and Nope. And I think this is where his skill truly lies, at present.
There were about five minutes of “Borders” that were gripping, dazzling, viscerally real to me. And then it went on for another twelve minutes, seemingly having lost the plot line.
Some of this was probably different for other audience members based on such small factors as our ages—when the first movement created a picture, in Abels’ own words, of “the guitar [as] a protagonist that is repeatedly confined by sonic bars or walls created by the orchestra,” causing the soloist’s voice to “struggle to find its spirit and expression between these sonic bars,” it’s understandable that the image that came to me—strongly, beautifully, resolutely—was that of the Teeter-Totter art project along the US-Mexican border.
In writing music for film, Abels is clearly practiced and gifted in the art of using sound to anchor an impression, whether visual or emotional. But with “Borders,” I wasn’t hearing what he was trying to show us with the second movement. My references for the Bosnian War are fragmented, given that I was a small child who could understand something about the refugees who made it into my mother’s classroom—less so what they left behind, even less so what their kin were living with in Denmark. Even looking at pictures of the “Sahara” refugee camp that was the basis for the museum exhibit that inspired this symphonic work, I can’t erase the clear image of the hot pink seesaws bobbing between the giant metal bars separating us from our southern neighbors.
This isn’t a failure of art.
If anything, if the first movement is so universal that I can feel sure it’s about a border conflict that is here and now, rather than far away and in my early childhood, that’s a different sort of success. Frankly, I’d love to hear the first movement performed again. If that comes at the cost of also hearing the second movement, which feels perhaps intentionally disorienting, meaning to depict “a child running, sometimes joyfully, but also sometimes in fear,” I might endure. I might get better at listening to the second part of it.
But I feel that the story was told poetically and poignantly within the first few minutes. Yet, with guitar not being a standard member of most orchestras, it seems unlikely that a soloist would be hired for anything less than the whole—it seems silly that structural demands would potentially have an impact on doing art “the right way” or “the best way,” but who hasn’t been required to produce more words than it took to effectively say what needed to be said in a term paper? Même combat.
Novak’s forest migrations:
I want to be friends with this dude. Like, legit, let’s grab a cuppa and chat at Grounds of Being or something. Where do these people come from? How do we get more of them?
This work is perhaps the most decidedly academic piece of art music I have ever heard. I enjoyed it, but I don’t want to hear it again as part of regular symphony programming.1 I would, however, love a recording of it. I would definitely assign a recording of it to students in environmental humanities classes. I could imagine that Dr. Mayes might ask those of us in the Nahara Kollel to give it a dedicated, thoughtful, focused listen between sessions about forest communities or models of resilience in the face of environmental catastrophe.
With a straight face and all seriousness—I do think we need more academic music. People need to hear science, among other things. And there’s room to evaluate perceived accuracy, to propose alternative ways of hearing the same process, to argue at length about whether the trees can actually say it better, themselves.
Absurdly ambitious, the ten-minute piece takes up the phenomenon that gives it its name: forest migration, when a forest “moves” its boundaries over time2 to areas that best support the growth of its community, elder trees being left to live out the last years of old edges while young upstarts gain strength in a part of the environment, a part of the world, that is more hospitable, undergrowth flocking to the Joshua trees as the original leaders of the community surrender their bodies to the soil. As if that weren’t enough, Novak attempts to include the alternative “migration” of forests into memory as they are destroyed by the direct activities and downstream effects of mankind’s ways of being. And yet a third migration enters into the conversation, paying homage to the way that trees are “migrated” into afterlives as orchestral instruments, sighing out the Loraxian thoughts of one Chicago composer.
And you know, I think he did a damn good job of it. The timescale of a forest, or even a single tree, can’t fit into a symphony3. But Novak created this fantastic, eerie sense of the slow creaking and creeping of a forest’s movements. If you’ve listened to the weird recordings of all the sounds plants make when we’re not listening, the tiny ticks and pops that drive house cats crazy, you’ll likely recognize that in Novak’s work. It felt, at times, like the violins and cellos were vocalizing remembrances, folktales, a cultural history of their own. Because he layered the physical story of forest migration with emotional and symbolic stories, it’s dense—like a lot of academic writing, or luscious creative writing. It requires slower listening, highlighting, replays of moments and sections and wholes. In ten minutes, you can get a step of the forest, but you’ll miss out on the beetles and mushrooms and trees. From this first experience with his work, it seems to me that what a Loren Eiseley essay is in the world of essays, a Paul Novak composition is in music.
Were this the only worthwhile piece, it would have been more than enough for me.
Charles’ Nightlife:
First, the obvious complaint: it feels sinful to call Kebra-Seyoun Charles just “Charles” for the sake of consistency between composers when that gorgeous Ethiopian name is right there, shining gloriously.4 Mea culpa.
I’ll start with the conclusion: “Nightlife” is the piece I would most like to hear performed again. Preferably by an ensemble that is willing to be playful and really be lit up by Charles’ work and vision, which in my estimation requires a lot more intimacy or personal musical confession than most professional symphony musicians are used to performing with—often it’s seemingly accepted that if you’re not a featured soloist, you can play without revealing a personality, or without revealing your own. Charles’ work calls for individuals to exist within the collective, for the organic to emerge from within a rehearsed environment. That’s not comfortable for a lot of folks. But I’d love to see and hear the results with a group who have all surrendered into themselves.
While this work is certainly not academic, it is robustly educated, smart, and cheeky. While Novak created something not far from a symphonic science fair presentation, Charles rightly gave the knowledge in “Nightlife” the go ahead to bump and grind things out. Clever, fun, both danceable and savory, plucking sounds from off the streets of New York City and emulating all the vibrancy of a nightclub, this piece is dense the way that Manhattan is dense, rather than the way that a term paper is. There’s a lot going on—most of it is recognizable—and you might not have time to respond to everything that happens, as it happens. Such is the reality of a night out on the town. I felt like I was witnessing the resident weird of the neighborhood, I felt like I was at a party, I felt like I was doing shots with a stranger at the bar, I felt like I was having a good time. I was having a good time.
And I had a good time despite—or because of—the complexity of Charles’ musical idiom. I had a good time because instruments were behaving in ways I don’t always expect them to. I had a good time because the bassists—all of them—were having an abnormally good time. I had a good time because there were lots of tapping feet. I had a good time because I’m getting used to dancing in the seats at Zankel.
I had a good time because it was good music. It was good music not just because it sounded good, not just because it balanced the familiar and the novel, not just because it expanded—gracefully and successfully—the range of what I thought a symphonic composition might comment on. It was all of that and more.
Polevá’s The Bell:
I wish I had more to say about this piece. Inbal Segev’s playing was beautiful, as it always seems to be, but I think what lacked for me was a real sense of movement between each movement. It’s difficult to comment on a war that’s still ongoing, and naturally my experience of it all is quite different and obviously more distant—practically and emotionally—than the composer’s. It felt like a few minutes that had been stretched out to over twenty—and that might very well be true to the realities of war. I’d be curious to see and hear what Polevá might compose about the same matter when Ukraine is again safe and at peace.
Stewart’s Embrace:
This didn’t do it for me. And that’s fine. I’m not opposed to electronic or hybrid music, or work that includes visuals, but stylistically this composition wasn’t something I would want to experience again, nor did I particularly enjoy it nor get other personal value from it the first time. It’s a piece that is clearly part of the musician’s process of grieving his mother’s death, and I can value it for however it’s helping him.
Was this a good way to spend the evening? Absolutely. There were some metaphorical cupcakes that I wouldn’t want another bite of, but there were others that I might just put in a catering order for—for a class, or for a party. I’m glad that I tried them all, and I’m glad that Carnegie and other performance venues give space for events where we can “sample” New Music.
That would be one hell of a date. So… what’d you think of the Novak piece? / Well. Are you ready to talk about mycelium for about an hour and a half, or should we get a drink, first?
For real, not in the Birnam Wood way.
This isn’t a challenge. Do not resurrect Mahler. That man needs his rest.
If you have facility with a Semitic language, say the name out loud a few times and you’ll probably start to hear the meaning.