Cheryl E. Leonard’s “Music from the Ice”

Yesterday afternoon the Golden Gate Valley Branch of the San Francisco Public Library hosted a presentation by composer Cheryl E. Leonard. The title on the announcement was Polar Resoundings. However, she also introduced the program as Antarctica: Music from the Ice. The former, however, was more accurate, since it involved the two polar extremes, which served as both inspiration and resources for Leonard’s compositions.

A female polar bear with her cub in Svalbard on drift ice in the Hinlopen strait (photograph by AWeith, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, from a Wikimedia Web page)

Antarctica: Music from the Ice is also the title of Leonard’s recent Other Minds album. The first three of the pieces she performed were taken from that album: “Fluxes,” “Point Eight Ice,” and Ablation Zone.” All of these involved field recordings as source material; and Leonard supplemented those recordings with performances involving objects taken from the field, primarily bones. For the remaining two selections, she shifted to the northern extreme with “Thresholds” and “Kelpnet.” Her sources were taken from Greenland and the Svalbard archipelago, which is situated far north of the northern Norwegian coast and to the east of Greenland.

This was one of those programs when there was never a dull moment. The diversity of sonorities that Leonard evoked was far beyond any expectations, and her delivery of the background information was consistently engaging and informative. Listening to the album this morning, I was reminded of just how rich the subtle details were in yesterday’s performance. What I missed, however, was Ooma Stern’s video content that she had projected yesterday, which consistently set just the right context for appreciating the listening matter.

Ultimately, Leonard’s “subject matter” is best served by the coupling of audio and video media that she presented yesterday; and, perhaps at some time in the near future, she will have an opportunity to create a video recording as informative as her event yesterday.