Sunday, November 22, 2020

Volti Presents Hege’s Ambitious Experiments

Yesterday evening, Volti, the Bay Area’s a cappella vocal ensemble that specializes in new music, launched its 42nd season, which will consist of four mini-concerts all held in cyberspace. The first program was devoted entirely to the premiere of Anne Hege’s “it sounds like all my dreams.” The piece lasted less than half an hour, but it could not have been richer in imaginative content.

The program sheet enumerated the resources for performance as follows:

  • SATB chorus, pre-recorded
  • SSATTB soloists, live-streamed
  • tape track
  • pre-recorded video
  • live zoom elements

The composition itself is in nine sections. Two of them are for the pre-recorded chorus, and two are for the soloists. These are interleaved with videos panning across the treetops in a lush setting (possibly the “forest primeval” that surrounds the Gualala Arts Center) accompanied by the tape track.

Hege provided the following note for the program sheet:

it sounds like all my dreams is an experiment. Through the creation and performance of this work, I am searching to find how life fits together in this new normal when music is made without hearing one another, when I am home every evening to listen to the crickets with my daughters, and when I am trying to fulfill my need to be musical often thwarted by distance and the limits of technology. Suddenly, what is musical to me is shifting.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt in my own mind that all the elements of the composition, including the tape track for the forest images, definitely make for a compelling musical experience. Indeed, like any good artist, Hege understands the limitations of her resources and exploits them to her advantage. This is most evident in the Zoom “conference” of the soloists.

The Zoom “conference” of the six live-streamed soloists (screen shot courtesy of Volti)

By now most of us are familiar with the difficulties of time-based coordination in Internet technology that resists establishing and maintaining a common pulse. Hege turns that bug into a feature (as the technology wonks like to say) by exploiting departures from that common pulse, rather than trying to avoid (or mask) them. As a result, the lack of synchronization among the soloists yields a unique sonority of its own, providing perhaps the most literal account of the sorts of shifts that Hege seems to have had in mind.

Equally important is Hege’s overall sense of pace. No individual section ever outstays its welcome. For that matter, the “forest murmurs” allow the listener to reflect on the vocal work just experienced while preparing for the section that will follow. As a result, the overall rhetoric is one of subtle movements churning beneath what appears to be a still surface. This is an act of making music that definitely deserves to be experienced more than once; and, since the overall framework is video, we should hope that the video will soon go into public circulation.

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