SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE
October 14, 2006

Scintillating Mix
By Michelle Dulak Thomson

The San Francisco Conservatory's BluePrint New Music Project opened its fifth season Saturday night, in Recital Hall in the Conservatory's new Oak Street digs, with a program titled "Fertility Rites." The title might as easily go for the whole BluePrint season (a premiere on this concert is to be complemented by three more on the programs to come), or indeed for BluePrint itself, which from its inception has specialized in making connections between older and newer figures on the contemporary-music scene and seeing what grows from the mix. Certainly the five pieces chosen by BluePrint's Music Director, Nicole Paiement, and played by the Conservatory's New Music Ensemble and guests, all centered on ideas of emergence, transformation, and growth in their sharply differing ways. It was, as I have come to expect from this series, a grand assemblage of musical possibilities.

Robert Cogan describes his 1977 Utterances (or Polyutterances when performed by more than one voice, as on Saturday) as an "open-ended folio" that "take[s] on features of a collage, mobile, or improvisation — every performance is different." I gather that the various elements of the vocal line — which sets a dizzyingly varied collection of text fragments, from Archilocus to Brecht, Milosz, Yeats, Joyce and the Buddha — can be assembled, disassembled, and overlaid at will.

The line is virtuosic in the extreme, but Joan Heller (for whom the piece was written) and Patrice Pastore reveled in its four-octave range, the flurries of staccato notes that suggest a demented Queen of the Night, and the various whooping, hissing, squeaking, spitting, and growling sound effects. Words sometimes emerged from the melee with eerie clarity, but more often they were simply exploited as a rich trove of phonemes, sonic stuff to be gleefully messed about with. Great fun to perform, I should think.

Sonic magic with a joyous groove
The program's other piece incorporating vocal sounds was Christos Hatzis's Fertility Rites (1997), which put them to different use. The work is for five-octave marimba and tape, with the tape's raw materials being marimba sounds and snippets of Inuit throat-singing (katajjaq). Both sources are electronically manipulated and distorted in various ways. The sound environment is a fascinating one. The marimba elements of the tape part sounded, in performance, as though they emanated from the live instrument, which consequently could do all sorts of impossible things. It was fascinating, for example, to see a mallet hit a note and then hear the decaying pitch bounce up and down as it faded, or spawn a cloud of ghostly echoes of itself. Bowed marimba elements came in too, contributing an aura of rich, sustained sounds that occasionally verged on the New Age-ish.

Composer Christos Hatzis
Hatzis writes that the katajjaq elements, derived from Inuit fertility chants, are "sexually suggestive," especially since the electronic processing lowers their pitch to create a "semblance of heavy breathing." Having heard this sort of material used in embarrassingly lame fashion in rather a lot of tape-based music, I admit that I braced myself for more of the same. Actually, the chants were put to amazingly effective use. Several times Hatzis set up an irresistible groove that combined with the live and virtual marimbas in a rush of increasingly chaotic and joyous energy. (For one long stretch the super-marimba overlaid the groove with a sort of deliriously elaborated café music.)

In Hatzis's programmatic conceit, the live player's "voice" is the instrument, the taped sounds his "thoughts" and "instincts." The piece made vivid the complex feedback between thinking, saying, thinking about the utterance, uttering the thought. It was a compositional tour de force. And a playerly one, too: Marimbist Mario Boivin attacked his part with spectacular control and flair.

An evanescent atmosphere
George Crumb's Quest, from 1994, followed Cogan's piece in the first half. The title sits oddly on a work whose guitarist protagonist doesn't seek anything so much as he explores, tentatively, the suggestions offered by his environment. An interval here, a gesture there, a delicate timbre somewhere else are picked up, fondled, ruminated on, and then laid aside.

The ensemble — harp, bass, soprano sax, and three percussionists who handled an impressive variety of instruments — produced timbres that were refined, even by Crumb's standards. The piece teemed with wispy, dimly evocative sounds. Hammered dulcimer, rain stick, gongs, and high-pitched percussion instruments of various kinds mingled gracefully with the other instruments in unexpected ways. Like much of Crumb's music, it seemed more atmosphere than substance, but that atmosphere was rare and attractive. The final, long denouement, over an ever-slowing harp tread, was spellbinding. Justin Riberio was the deft guitarist; he was joined by members of the New Music Ensemble in a performance of great subtlety and control under Paiement's precise baton.

Hans Werne Henze's 2001 L'heure bleue, involving four strings, seven woodwinds, two brass, harp, piano, and a large array of percussion, taxed the capacity of the new Conservatory Recital Hall's stage. Long, lyrical lines predominated, beginning with the strings and spreading into the winds, culminating in a richly dense stew of largely low- and mid-register sound.

The score calls for a wind/ brass section of flute and alto flute, oboe d'amore, cor anglais and bassoon, clarinet and bass clarinet, horn and euphonium. When all were in full cry, they made a gloriously pungent, reedy noise. The strings spent most of their time in the same mid-register, the violin's part lying rather low and the cello's dauntingly high. Henze's note — the title refers to the hour of dusk on the shores of the Mediterranean, and the composer speaks of "the contentedly contemplative atmosphere of a summer evening's serenade" — doesn't quite prepare one for the vividness of the colors, nor the volume of the sound. "Vigorous serenity" might be a fair description of the mood. The New Music Ensemble took on the music's meaty lyricism with evident enthusiasm.

Mesmerizing premiere
The evening closed with the world premiere of Canadian François Rose's Le temps scintillé, a piece written for the New Music Ensemble and Paiement. As with the Henze, fitting the ensemble (five strings, four woodwinds, three brass, two marimbas and a piano) on the stage took some doing, but after a little tweaking of the setup everyone was accommodated.

The composer's note begins, "For Le temps scintillé, I imagine music being like a curtain of light that I could slow down in order to zoom [in] on different temporal layers and focus on their light." I don't think I have ever heard a work match its capsule description more perfectly. That was exactly the effect: an intricate tissue of sound teased apart, slowed down, magnified, lovingly anatomized. Gestures threw off pitches that then persisted in the texture. Other pitches gradually worked their way into, and back out of, the mix. In the last extended section, a quickly pulsating music established itself, gradually contested and finally engulfed by sustained pitches that entered with increasing vehemence and finally coalesced with one another. The whole arc of the piece is meticulously graduated, seemingly organic, and mesmerizing in its steady unfolding. It was a heady experience, and one that lived up to the concert's title in every way. A piece with a future, this.

(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.)

©2006 Michelle Dulak Thomson, all rights reserved