Dynamite Guitars: Xuefei Yang to follow Topchii

Guitarist Xuefei Yang (from her Omni Foundation Concert Calendar Web page)

Some readers may recall the announcement on this site this past Tuesday of the solo performance by Ukrainian virtuoso guitarist Marko Topchii. This will be the second Dynamite Guitars recital of the New Year, following up on this month’s solo recital by Miloš Karadaglić (better known under only his first name). Guitar enthusiasts will happy to know that the third recital of the year in this series will take place exactly one week after the second!

This will be Xuefei Yang’s fourth solo recital presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. It will follow up on the third solo recital she gave here in March of 2023, which featured music from the previous release of her Guitar Favorites album. For this return visit, she has prepared her own arrangement of a piece of traditional Chinese music. Final program details have not yet been released, but the contributing composers will be (in alphabetical order) Leo Brouwer, Carlo Domeniconi, Steve Goss, Lou Harrison, Jiří Jirmal, Nikita Koshkin, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Changjun Xu.

This will be the last of the three recitals of the season hosted by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Like the first, it will be performed in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the Ann Getty Center for Education, which is located at 50 Oak Street. The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 8. Admission will be $65 for all tickets, and they may be purchased online through a City Box Office event page. They may also be purchased by calling 415-242-4500, which will provide personalized service.

Violin and Percussion Music from NEC

courtesy of Naxos of America

This Friday Naxos will release an album entitled Works for Violin and Percussion Orchestra. The violinist is Nicholas Kitchen; and the percussionists are members of the New England Conservatory (NEC) Percussion Ensemble, led by Frank Epstein. As is usually the case, Amazon is currently processing pre-orders for this new recording.

The album consists of three compositions, the first and last of which are receiving their world premiere recordings. The first of these is “Xochiquetzal,” composed by Robert Xavier Rodríguez in 2014. The album concludes with a concerto for violin and percussion orchestra composed by Kati Agócs in 2018. Between these two selections is another such concerto, this one composed by Lou Harrison. He completed this composition in 1959 but had begun work on it in 1940.

Each of these pieces has its own characteristic voice. However, because of the breadth of resources that inspired Harrison’s ethnographic interests, there is some sense of “family resemblance” between his concerto and “Xochiquetzal,” which is structured as five uninterrupted movements. The latter can be approached as “imaginary folk music,” a term that Rodríguez appropriated from Manuel de Falla.

Rodríguez prepared his own notes for the booklet, where he explains that his title is the name of “an ancient Mayan goddess associated with music, dance, beauty, love, fertility and female sexual power.” Each of the movements reflects on a different aspect of this protagonist, and the composer’s skill at combining a wide diversity of percussion instruments with the solo violin (which represents Xochiquetzal) makes for engaging listening. Nevertheless, while Rodríguez’ voice is decidedly unique, Harrison’s concerto provides excellent “orientation” for the listener, introducing rhetorical tropes that would prepare the listener for the more narrative qualities of “Xochiquetzal.”

Agócs’ concerto, on the other hand, is based on an entirely different lexicon of tropes for both the violin and the percussion accompaniment. Nevertheless, there are signs of her awareness of Harrison’s lyrical qualities, including some not usually associated with members of the percussion family. What particularly strikes the attentive listener is her ability to overlay a variety of thematic tropes, creating the effect that the listener feels surrounded by a stimulating simultaneity of competing voices. I was also more than moderately pleased to see that, in his capacity as teacher, Milton Babbitt did not let his interest in mathematics interfere with his approach to coaching Agócs!

Other Minds Presents Early Harrison Composition

A 1940 photograph of Lou Harrison on the cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Other Minds)

Today Other Minds released its latest album available through its home page on Bandcamp. The entire album is devoted to one of Lou Harrison’s earliest compositions, his Opus 7 sonata for unaccompanied violin, composed in 1936. Performed by Kate Stenberg, the duration is only about seven minutes; but, given the rich program notes provided by Harrison biographer Bill Alves, this is a “must have” offering, not only for Harrison enthusiasts but for the perspective of what was happening in the United States during the second quartet of the twentieth century.

Harrison graduated from high school in 1934. As Alves’ notes put it, “he immediately immersed himself in the Bay Area’s vibrant, though provincial, world of innovative musicians, choreographers, artists, and bohemians.” That immersion would lead to his discovery of Henry Cowell, who provided Harrison with composition lessons even when Cowell was serving time for a morals charge in San Quentin State Prison. Those lessons led to an awareness of Arnold Schoenberg’s approach to giving equal treatment to all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Alves describes Harrison’s interest in that approach as follows:

Although he would write several important works using Schoenberg’s method in the first half of his career, the young Harrison sometimes struggled with the necessity to write a C-sharp at a certain point when his melodic intuition demanded a C natural.

As a result Harrison developed his own technique based on intervals, rather than pitch classes. He applied that technique to the first and last of the three movements of his Opus 7 sonata, both in Largo tempo. While the middle movement of the sonata, Allegro Vigoroso, does not follow that technique, it is also based on interval content, focusing on major seconds and minor sixths. Alves’ examination of Harrison’s methods makes for absorbing and engaging reading; but one might still come away asking “Where’s the music?”

That question is answered by Stenberg’s performance. Through her interpretation, all of Harrison’s “marks on paper” emerge as a thoroughly engaging discourse. As the score progresses from one movement to the next, Stenberg’s expressive interpretation leads the listener through a rich series of dispositions. Thus, while Harrison’s approach to the management of intervals provides provide the “skeleton” of his sonata, Stenberg endows that skeleton with flesh and blood, reminding serious music students that one of Heinrich Schenker’s favorite adjectives was “organic.” Those who lack such “serious foundations” will still appreciate Stenberg’s ability to lead them through a refreshingly energetic journey.

Early Reich Tape Music Without the Tape

Steve Reich’s earliest “serious” compositions came out of his work here at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. HIs first major work, “It’s Gonna Rain” involved multiple copies of a loop taken from a sermon by a black Pentecostal street-preacher known as Brother Walter that moved in and out of phase with each other. This led to a whole new repertoire of sonorities organized around principles that had little to do with past techniques in music history.

“It’s Gonna Rain” was composed in 1965. By 1967 Reich had begun to shift his attention to phase techniques based on performing instruments, rather than “concrete” tape sources. Yesterday afternoon, at the final concert of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) entitled Synergy & Synthesis, the program concluded with one of those 1967 compositions, “Violin Phase.” This involved a “live” violinist (Hrabba Atladottir) performing with three recordings of violin performances of a single pattern subjected to phase shifting.

In 1967 those recordings were made on magnetic tape, which involved serious difficulties where precise timing was concerned. Fortunately, those problems no longer arise thanks to digital technology. As a result, Jeremy Wagner was able to create digital tracks for yesterday’s performance, working at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California at Berkeley.

What interested Reich most about his technique was the way in which the ear would recognize (synthesize?) patterns that were not in the notation but emerged through the “interference patterns” of phase-shifting. Those patterns resided solely “in the ear of the listener.” Where “Violin Phase” was concerned, the “primary listener” was the violinist. Rather than contributing to the repeated patterns on the tapes, the violinist was instructed to listen to the patterns emerging through interference and then perform repetitions of them. This not only added to the overall “phase texture” but also guided the listener into and through those processes of emergence. Thus, what might initially strike the unfamiliar listener as little more than obsessive repetition turns out to be a diversely variegated “playing field” in which new melodic patterns are discovered and exploited.

Yesterday afternoon was my first opportunity to listen to this music in performance, rather than on recording. Watching Atladottir at work greatly facilitated my awareness of the emergent patterns she would discover and distinguish from the textured patterns of the tape music. The fact is that, when one listens to a recording of “Violin Phase,” separating the violinist from the recorded patterns is no easy matter. However, during yesterday’s performance in the Joe Henderson Lab of the SFJAZZ Center, the eye was capable of sorting out the textures in ways that the ear could not. The result was a journey of discovery that no mere recording could begin to approach.

The other “historical” offering on yesterday’s program was the opening selection. Percussionist William Winant performed Lou Harrison’s “Solo to Anthony Cirone.” This was scored for a metallophone of Harrison’s own design based on the integer ratios of just intonation tuning. One could thus follow not only Winant’s approaches to striking these metallic bars but also the resonances emerging from sympathetic vibrations.

Winant then accompanied tenor Eric Dudley (also SFCMP Artistic Director) in a performance of the three-movement song cycle entitled [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG. Composer Steed Cowart worked with three texts by Stephen Ratcliffe, each of which involved deconstructing and reassembling strings of words from the sonnets of William Shakespeare. As might be guessed, the strings of words for each song lacked what one might expect in the coherence of semantics. However, between the music itself and Dudley’s deliveries of the text settings, what might be called “dispositional meaning” emerged from his interpretation of each song. That left more than enough for mind to consider both during and after the performance.

The remaining two works on the program were solo performances by Kyle Bruckmann, the first on oboe and the second on cor anglais. The oboe selection was entitled “Arachne,” composed by Helen Grime in 2012. It was a relatively brief piece evocative of the weaving of a web (at least to those that “got” the title). Orlando Jacinto García’s “Separación” was composed in 2001 for cor anglais and electronics. This involve a thickly textured “background” provided by the electronics within which the cor anglais would weave its own path. The title suggests that the music is, among other things, an exercise for the listener in recognizing the separation between the  “physical” instrumental sounds and the “virtual” synthesized ones.

Taken as a whole, the program was true to its title, dealing not only with synthesis but also with the synergies that emerge on the borderline between the physical and the virtual.

SFS Subscription Concert for Chinese New Year

Regular readers will probably know by now that the annual Chinese New Year Concert, presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), will take place on the first Saturday of next month, February 5. This year, however, that celebratory offering will be followed by a subscription concert that will focus on both Chinese repertoire and the pipa, sometimes called the “Chinese lute.” The conductor will be Perry So, who was mentored by Esa-Pekka Salonen and will be making his SFS subscription series debut. The pipa soloist will be Wu Man, who has previously performed with the Kronos Quartet and will also be making her SFS subscription series debut.

1997 photograph of Wu Man with Lou Harrison (courtesy of Shuman Associates)

For that matter all five of the compositions on the program will be given SFS premiere performances. “First among these equals,” so to speak, will be Wu’s appearance as soloist in Lou Harrison’s concerto for pipa and string orchestra. All of the other composers on the program are Asian as follows:

• Texu Kim: Bounce!!
• Younghi Pagh-Paan: NIM
• Takashi Yoshimatsu: The Age of Birds
• Zhou Long: The Rhyme of Taigu

Some readers may recall that Kim’s “Spin-Flip” will be performed the previous Saturday at the Chinese New Year Concert.

This concert will be given only two performances, both at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, February 11, and Saturday, February 12. A single Web page has been created with hyperlinks for purchasing tickets for each of those dates. Tickets are priced between $20 and $125. There will be an Inside Music talk, free to all concert ticket holders, given by Laura Stanfield Prichard one hour prior to each concert. Doors will open fifteen minutes before the talk begins.

Times Have Changed!

This past Wednesday I wrote about my mixed feelings about the composer Roy Harris after having read what Virgil Thomson had to say about Harris’ third symphony in his book of essays American Music Since 1910, which appeared in 1971. That was one of the chapters included in the second Library of America collection of his writings, edited by Tim Page. I have now finished this section, which concludes with an essay entitled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (without crediting either James Agee or Agee’s source, the Apocrypha book “Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach”).

What struck me is how Thomson’s perspective from over a quarter-century ago now seems questionable in ways that would not have occurred to him. Consider this sentence:

But for lieder in English I know of no model, excepting the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan, which are perfect.

These days, Gilbert’s words no longer seem as perfect as they used to be. One only has to cite the use of the N-word in Ko-Ko’s Patter song in The Mikado. Indeed, Lamplighters Music Theatre was so aware of the “political correctness” issue of proper British ladies and gentlemen pretending to be Japanese that the directors transplanted the entire narrative to Renaissance Milan for a production entitled The New Mikado: Una Commedia Musicale!

Mind you, the fact that Thomson had to turn to light opera, rather than art song, to account for “lieder in English” probably raised eyebrows even when his book first appeared. However, if that is the context that he wished to establish, then I suspect a good case can be made that Stephen Sondheim has displaced both W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan with his skills in crafting both music and lyrics. Indeed, the Wikipedia page for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has a section entitled “Opera house productions,” one of which was performed by our own San Francisco Opera during the fall of 2015.

Nevertheless, none of this has anything to do with the art song repertoire. The fact is that there is a glaring paucity of contemporary composers in the programs being presented by San Francisco Performances in its Art of Song series. Indeed, my most memorable encounters with that repertoire have taken place at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with recitalists performing songs by Mark Adamo and Jake Heggie; and even those events have arisen seldomly.

It is also worth noting that the “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” essay was probably written quite some time after the “Looking Backward” essay that cited Harris’ “eloquent Third Symphony.” In the later essay, Thomson writes:

Roy Harris’s works, I am sorry to say, do not travel so widely or so well.

Those that have read my earlier account will recognize my sympathy with that sentence. Thomson’s enthusiasm is directed at other composers, and my strongest agreement probably comes from his acknowledgement of the work of Lou Harrison. However, when it comes to living composers, I am not sure where my own preferences reside. I suppose John Adams continues to hold the top spot on my own list of preferences; and, among those “on the rise,” i have had several memorable encounters with performances of the music of Amadeus Julian Regucera.

There is one line that Maurice Chevalier sang in the film Gigi:

Forevermore is shorter than before.

I have not the foggiest idea whether any of the music I listen to these days will enjoy even an approximation of permanence. Indeed, the risk of going hopelessly out of fashion probably applies as much to Johann Sebastian Bach as it does Adams. That just happens to be one of the side-effects in the world the Internet has made.

Harrison’s Concerto for Piano and Gamelan

courtesy of Jensen Artists

This past fall the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) released a recording of a previously presented concert performance. The concert took place at the CMA Gartner Auditorium on October 20, 2017 and was performed by pianist Sarah Cahill and the Gamelan Galak Tika under the direction of Evan Ziporyn and Jody Diamond. The ensemble presented Lou Harrison’s “Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan,” the composer’s rarely performed second piano concerto.

As of this writing, the album is available only in digital form. Amazon.com has created a Web page for MP3 download. The bad news is that the download is entirely devoid of program notes. The good news is that the Web page includes an extended review by “Canticle,” which was uploaded this past November 17. The review includes descriptions of the concerto’s three movements, preceded by extensive background material sure to warm the heart of anyone that enjoys Harrison’s music (present company included).

However, as the hucksters like to say, that’s not all. CMA has created its own Web page for this recording. The site includes a player for streaming all three movements of the concerto, followed by extended essays by Cahill, Diamond, and Ziporyn. Cahill, in turn, cites Lou Harrison: American Music Maverick by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell, which, since its publication in 2017, has served me well as a primary reference for all-things-Harrison.

Harrison composed this concerto relatively late in life, when his primary focus was on just intonation and the integer ratios one encounters in the pitch classes of gamelan instruments. To bring these instruments together with a piano would require retuning the piano to honor those integer ratios in place of the “irrational” ratio (the twelfth root of two), which is the basis for equal tempered tuning. In reading the Alves-Campbell account of this concerto, one gets the impression that Harrison began by composing the gamelan music. The result would then guide how the piano would be retuned to fit into the “gamelan context.” Once the tuning had been finalized, the piano part could be developed around sharing thematic material. Actually, the concerto begins with an extended solo passage for the piano, allowing the ear to adjust to the intervals of the gamelan instruments before they join the piano.

The entire concerto is less than half an hour in duration. The first two movements are roughly ten minutes long, while the final movement is decidedly shorter. I must confess that my own listening habits are still adjusting the the concerto in its entirety, but the recording has left me eager to encounter this music in a concert setting. It also left me curious about what other joys may be lurking in the CMA recorded archives.

The Audience Returns at Mills College

Last year, due to pandemic conditions, the annual Darius Milhaud Concert was live-streamed from the Jeannik Méquet Littlefield Concert Hall on the campus of Mills College. Last night this year’s Milhaud Concert again took place in Littlefield. Again the entire program was live-streamed; but this time there was a difference: there was also an audience in the Hall. Indeed, this was the first time an audience was allowed to attend a performance since lockdown restrictions were imposed.

All eight of the selections were solo performances, thus obviating any concerns about distancing on stage. (The live-stream gave no sign of where members of the audience were sitting.) The music alternated between compositions by Milhaud and those of other former Mills faculty composers. Each of the Milhaud selections was written for a different instrument. In “order of appearance,” the selections were as follows:

1. Ségoviana, Opus 366, performed by guitarist David Tanenbaum
2. Sonatina pastorale, Opus 383, performed by violinist Kate Stenberg
3. The four Romances sans paroles, Opus 129, performed by pianist Belle Bulwinkle
4. The Opus 437 sonata performed by harpist Jennifer Ellis

The concluding harp sonata was one of Milhaud’s last compositions, and his opus count ended at 443.

All of the works by other faculty composers were written for percussion and performed by William Winant. As might be guessed, one of those composers was Lou Harrison. “Solo to Anthony Cirone” was composed in 1972 and involved one of the first of the “American Gamelan” instruments invented and constructed by Harrison, working with his partner William Colvig. Winant also observed that he played on one of the last of the instruments developed by Harrison and Colvig, the Ptolemy Duple:

William Winant playing the Ptolemy Duple (screen shot from video of last night’s performance)

Chris Brown recently completed “Epimorphic Quiverings” for this instrument, encouraged to do so by Winant.

The other single-instrument percussion composition was Roscoe Mitchell’s “Bells for New Orleans.” This was written in 2005 for a book of music entitled SUMMIT: Compositions for Unaccompanied Orchestra Bells, compiled by Sylvia Smith. Mitchell’s contribution was written for the people who suffered (and continue to suffer) the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina. “Bells for New Orleans” was first performed at a San Francisco Contemporary Music Players concert in February of 2009.

The first of Winant’s offerings was the only one to involve multiple instruments. This was Alvin Curran’s “Theme Park – Part IV,” composed in 1995. The composition was dominated by a single pitch class played at different octave levels. While this could have been imaginatively playful, the extent of the composer’s imagination was more limited than one might have wished, making this the only work in the program likely to leave the listener restless and wondering when it would conclude.

This was a particularly sharp contrast, since Milhaud was a master of brevity. Only Opus 437 approached the more extended durations of a three-movement sonata. However, that length seems to have emerged from Milhaud’s desire to explore the many ways in which harp sonorities and phrases differ so distinctively from those of other instruments. There was very much a sense that Opus 437 was conceived as a journey of discovery in which Milhaud intended to share each of his discoveries with the attentive listener.

Mills to Live-Stream Annual Milhaud Concert

Darius Milhaud surrounded by his students at Mills College (from the Mills Performing Arts event page for the annual Darius Milhaud Concert)

Some readers may recall that roughly a year ago is when I announced the annual Darius Milhaud Concert, which was live-streamed from the Jeannik Méquet Littlefield Concert Hall on the campus of Mills College. This year’s event will focus on four works that Milhaud composed for a solo instrument. These will be:

1. Sonatina Pastorale, Opus 383, performed by violinist Kate Stenberg
2. Ségoviana, Opus 366, performed by guitarist David Tanenbaum
3. The Opus 437 sonata performed by harpist Jennifer Ellis
4. The four Romances san paroles, Opus 129, performed by pianist Belle Bulwinkle

The other soloist for the evening will be percussionist William Winant, who will play works for solo percussion by former Mills faculty composers: Roscoe Mitchell, Alvin Curran, Lou Harrison, and Chris Brown. The Brown composition will be a world premiere performance.

The concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, September 24. There will be no charge for admission, but those living in San Francisco will be more interested in viewing the live stream. This can be arranged by registration through an Eventbrite event page. There will be no charge for registering; and, once the viewer has been registered, (s)he will receive the hyperlink to the live stream presentation on the day of the event.

Sarah Cahill’s Harrison House Recital

Sarah Cahill playing at Harrison House (screen shot from the Vimeo video recording being discussed)

This past August pianist Sarah Cahill gave a recital at Harrison House as part of its Sunday Morning Listening Room series. Located in Joshua Tree, Lou Harrison and his partner William Colvig built the straw bale structure (with a little help from their many friends) on land they had purchased in Joshua Tree. The structure now hosts Harrison House Music Arts & Ecology, supporting residencies in the three disciplines enumerated in that extended name under the direction of Eva Soltes. Cahill performed her recital as part of her tenure as Artist-in-Residence; and her recital was planned to be live-streamed. Sadly, the streaming process fell afoul of technical difficulties. Fortunately, a video recording of the entire recital was directed and produced by Soltes, who uploaded it to Vimeo about two months ago.

As expected, Cahill performed a generous selection of Harrison compositions. These were interleaved with music by two contemporary composers, whose works reflect many of the spirits that had inspired Harrison. One of them, Mamoru Fujieda, has devoted his life to a project he calls Patterns of Plants, and Pinna Records released a recording of Cahill playing a selection of compositions resulting from that project in September of 2014. The other composer on the program was Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun, who, in addition to composing, set up a foundation to help needy children in both Africa and the District of Columbia study music.

All three of these composers developed their own unique approaches to making music. Nevertheless, when Cahill had them share a single program, it almost seemed as if the program itself had a unifying theme. That theme amounted to a study in the wide variety of techniques of embellishment that could be engaged. This was particularly evident in the four Guèbrou selections, each of which involved a relatively straightforward theme, usually with one or two bluesy chromatics. That theme was then subjected to highly elaborate and rhythmically eccentric embellishments, almost challenging the listener to keep track of the theme as all of those embellishments unfolded.

In a somewhat similar vein, the opening Harrison composition was the third sonata from his 1943 Six Sonatas for Cembalo. In introducing this piece, Cahill observed that the influences behind this collection included both Domenico Scarlatti and Manuel de Falla. Thus it was no surprise that many of the embellishing techniques one encounters in Scarlatti’s prolific collection of keyboard sonatas could be found in Harrison’s music (with his own personal twists on Scarlatti’s techniques, of course).

Fujieda’s case is somewhat different. When I wrote about Cahill’s album for Examiner.com when it was released, I provided the following “technical details” behind his approach to composition:

That project was inspired by the Plantron, a device created by Yūji Dōgane, a botanist who is also a practicing artist. The Plantron was designed to measure electrical fluctuation on the surface of the leaves of plants. Fujieda used the Max programming system to convert data streams of such measurements into sounds. He would then occupy himself with intense listening to those resulting sounds in search of musical patterns, transcribing them into conventional notation when he encountered them. He would subsequently compose short pieces around those patterns, arranged as collections.

As Cahill observed, Fujieda has kept the details of his transcription techniques to himself. Nevertheless, her approach to execution tended to guide the ear through distinctions between Fujieda’s underlying patterns and the techniques he engaged to embellish those patterns. At least that would be one viable hypothesis. Another, which I raised when discussing Cahill’s album, is that, in the spirit of John Cage and Morton Feldman, Fujieda’s “marks on paper” provided the performer with a background against which a foreground of embellishment could be developed at the player’s discretion. Thus, Cahill is one of several performers to have recorded Fujieda’s music; and there is a strong possibility that every act of performance emerges from its own unique approach to interpreting the composer’s manuscripts.

Mind you, where all three of these composers are concerned, all of the above may be merely personal speculation. More important was the compelling sense of rhetorical expression that Cahill evoked in each of her performance selections. Lasting about 70 minutes, the entire recital was an engaging journey of discovery, even when several of the offerings were familiar. Soltes’ video work in capturing the performance facilitated how a listener could make that journey, meaning that the recording escalated the act of listening beyond sit-still-at-a-concert behavior to a level in which sight and sound mutually reinforced each other.

Harrison House to Live Stream Cahill Recital

Those familiar with the life of Lou Harrison probably know that he spent the better part of his mature life with his partner, William Colvig, in Aptos, California. Much of their time together was occupied with designing and constructing instruments suitable for the music that Harrison was composing. Following Colvig’s death, Harrison, who was 84 at the time, decided to build his own dream home. He purchased land in Joshua Tree, California; and In 2002, with the help of many friends, he built a straw bale house of his own design sealed with adobe. Footage of the construction process was included in Eva Soltes’ documentary Lou Harrison: A World of Music. The heart of the structure was a vaulted great room proportionately designed for the performance of music. The Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology Web site describes this as Harrison’s “last and finest instrument:”

from the Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology “About” Web page

That Web site now hosts a residency and performance program for international artists and environmental activists. The program was launched in 2006, about three years after Harrison’s death. One of the current residents is pianist Sarah Cahill, and her residency will include a free recital that will be live-streamed.

Cahill’s program will include the premiere performance of the original version of Harrison’s serenade, composed in 1943. Her program will begin with Harrison’s third cembalo sonata, composed in the same year. Other Harrison compositions will include his 1948 “Homage to Milhaud,” the 1977 waltz he dedicated to Evelyn Hinrichsen, and “Tandy’s Tango,” composed in 1992. Cahill will also use her program continue to explore the extensive repertoire of compositions by Mamoru Fujieda collected under the title Patterns of Plants. This is an ongoing project of collections of pieces all entitled “Pattern,” which began in 1995. Cahill will play selections from the seventh collection (1997), the twelfth (1999), the thirteenth (2003), and the nineteenth (2010). (That last collection, which Fujieda began in 2008, has the title The Olive Branch Speaks.) The program will also include four pieces by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, a 96-year-old Ethiopian nun.

This recital will begin at 10 a.m. on Sunday, August 9. (The early time should facilitate reception for much of a worldwide audience.) The video stream will be enabled through the Harrison House Web site. Details have not yet been announced, but the home page for that site is currently hosting two videos. Most likely a new Vimeo frame will be created on that page for viewing the live-stream.

Sony’s Fromm Collection: Choral Music

The second CD in Sony Classical’s ten-CD box set of the Twentieth Century Composers Series recordings, supported by the Fromm Music Foundation, was curated by Margaret Hillis. The CD presents two decidedly different settings of the text of the Mass ordinary performed by the New York Concert Choir and Orchestra (the latter only in the second setting). The Choir was initially known as the Tanglewood Alumni Chorus, which Hillis founded in 1950. These days she is better known as the founder of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, which she founded in September of 1957, giving its first performance the following March.

The two settings on this recording are refreshingly different. The a cappella version is by Wilhelm Killmayer, born in Bavaria in 1927. Killmayer wrote that he composed this piece with “the purpose of liberating the music of the Mass from its formal liturgical ties;” and it is unlikely that one would ever mistake his efforts for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Nevertheless, my own sense of music history kicked in almost immediately, responding to his opening “Kyrie” setting as if it were melismatic organum on a bad acid trip. (Note to the reader: That description is decidedly not pejorative. It was inspired by my own experiences of Sixties culture; and, as they say, you had to be there. Furthermore, since Killmayer’s setting was written between 1953 and 1954, I have at least a few doubts that Pérotin was foremost in the mind of the composer.) As the setting proceeds, all vestiges of the past are shed; but the composer is as committed to elaborate polyphony as the early Notre Dame composers had been.

Lou Harrison on the cover of his biography written by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell (from the Amazon.com Web page for the book)

The other setting is by Lou Harrison, originally composed in 1939 and revised in 1952. Harrison’s original idea was to imagine the sort of plainsong that might have been sung by converted Native Americans in Spanish California. He described his revised version as “Europeanized;” and the original conception of plainsong gave way to those same medieval approaches to polyphony that may have inspired Killmayer. Nevertheless, Harrison’s compositional style is definitely his own; and the expansiveness of his instrumental writing brings its own unique variations on past treatments of the Latin text.

I think it would be fair to say that Harrison’s focus on modality makes him somewhat of an outlier in the entire Fromm collection. Like Leon Kirchner, Harrison studied with Arnold Schoenberg and took an interest in “twelve-tone” techniques. However, his approaches had less to do with Schoenberg and more to do with another Schoenberg student, John Cage; and, around the same time, both Harrison and Cage were influenced by Henry Cowell (who probably provided the primary inspiration to work with modal foundations). Cage’s only encounter with Paul Fromm, whose foundation financed the Twentieth Century Composers Series, seems to have taken place at Tanglewood in 1960. Aaron Copland introduced the two of them; and, on  the basis of one of Cage’s letters to David Tudor, the encounter was not a pleasant one!

Early Pursuits in Just Intonation on Bridge

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

In the course of my pursuing opportunities to listen to music composed to be performed by instruments based on just intonation tuning, my interest in the PARTCH ensemble, founded by guitarist John Schneider, has led me to a much earlier release by Bridge Records entitled Just West Coast, which was released at the end of October of 1993. The title is clearly a pun but a useful one, indicating that the compositions performed are all by composers closely associated with the West Coast. Lou Harrison frames the entire album with the opening and closing selections. Between him one encounters La Monte Young, Harry Partch, and John Cage. Cage is the one composer that did not explicitly work with just intonation; but, in his earliest piano compositions, he explored the expressiveness of a limited gamut, using tones that readily lent themselves to integer-based interval ratios, rather than equal-tempered tuning. (Schneider clearly enjoys the pun of the title, since he has more recently performed on the MicroFest albums Just Strings and Just National Guitar.)

On the earlier album “Just Strings” is the name of the performing duo of Schneider and harpist Amy Shulman. All but two of the selections were arranged by performance by Schneider, and those two selections are the two solo performances on the album. Shulman’s selection is Cage’s “In a Landscape,” which is listed in the Edition Peters catalog under both “Piano” and “Harp.” Cage explicitly stated that the piano dampers be raised for the entire performance of about eight minutes, since that performance “depends on the sustaining of resonances.” The vibrations of the harp strings, on the other hand, are naturally sustained unless explicitly damped by the performer; but the resonances that Cage required arise more “naturally” through the integer ratios of just intonation tuning.

Schneider’s solo provided the first recording of the original version of “Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California.” Partch performed the vocal line of this piece (both spoken and sung), accompanying himself on a guitar he adapted with frets that would enable intervals based on just intonation. This piece was subsequently given a variety of different versions, some of which required instruments of Partch’s own invention; but it is important to recognize that it began as something Partch could perform on his own. This makes Just West Coast a valuable resource for those interested in the chronological path leading to Partch’s more elaborate compositions.

Two other selections received their first recording on this album. One of these is the final composition, a collection of six single-movement sonatas that Harrison composed for piano or cembalo, meaning that the strings could be either struck or plucked. Schneider opts for the latter, arranging four of them for guitar and harp and the other two for solo guitar. The single-movement structure recalls the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, a connection that Harrison himself acknowledges; and, for the most part, he follows the same two-section structure that one encounters in the Scarlatti sonatas.

The other first recording is of Schneider’s just-intonation arrangement of Young’s “Sarabande,” originally written as an exercise for solo piano in 1959. This predated the composer’s interest in just intonation, which would eventually emerge in his marathon The Well-Tuned Piano, which was given its world premiere performance in Rome in 1974. Nevertheless, the score for “Sarabande” lends itself to integer ratios, which were then explicitly realized through Schneider’s arrangement.

The opening selection is the other Harrison composition on the album. The title “Suite No. 2” is a bit deceptive. Harrison used the title “suite” frequently; and one has only to peruse the index of the biography by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell to appreciate that sorting out all of those instances is no easy matter. Indeed, the title would show up again in 2008 on the Mode Records release POR GITARO: Suites for Tuned Guitars, also of performances by Schneider and Just Strings. However, the movements on the Bridge recording seem to resurface on the Mode album in two numbered suites and possibly also the “Suite for National Steel Guitar.” Thus, those who know their Harrison through more recent recordings will probably find themselves on familiar ground on the Bridge album, in which the Just Strings duo is extended to include percussionist Gene Sterling.

Most interesting where sonority is concerned is probably the set of two Partch studies based on his research into Ancient Greek music. The first of these uses the pentatonic scale formed by so-called “5-limit” just intonation. More fascinating, however, is the second study based on a scale formed by the enharmonic tetrachords. No one is quite sure of just what the enharmonic intervals are other than their being smaller than a semitone. Wikipedia cites Ptolemy’s account of Archytas as specifying the very small integer ratios of 28:27 and 36:35, and Partch cites Archytas in the title of his study. The ear will quickly pick up on just how narrow these intervals are.

Far more conducive to attentive listening is Schneider’s arrangement of Cage’s “Dream,” the composer’s earliest cataloged composition for solo piano. Like “In a Landscape,” this was composed to be played with the dampers raised, again in the interest of sustaining natural resonances. Here, again, those resonances are reinforced with a performance based on integer ratios.

Those who have followed this site for a while may recall that, almost exactly two years ago, I wrote an extended “think piece” about the nature of listening to integer ratios. Since that time, my experience with such listening has grown more prodigiously that I would have anticipated. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Roger Sessions, I think I can look back on what I wrote at that time without blushing. Perhaps I would have been better informed had I already been exposed to Just West Coast; but I was working in Singapore at the time of its release, which was not the best place to try to keep up with recordings of adventurous approaches to making music. Apparently, I am still in the process of making up for my own Proustian “temps perdu” (lost time)!

Another “Just” Album from MicroFest

At the beginning of last month, MicroFest Records released its latest album of music by composers interested in the use of just intonation. My own interest in this approach to tuning dates back to my time in graduate school, when I could spend hours pouring over a chart in the second edition of Willi Apel’s Harvard Dictionary of Music, which compared the frequency differences between equal-tempered tuning and earlier systems based on the integer ratios of the perfect fifth (3:2) and the major third (5:4). That interest was revived as a result of reading Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell, which so absorbed me that I found myself already writing before I had finished the book. That “intermediate” exercise was an article on this site entitled “On Listening to Integer Ratios,” which was when I documented my first thoughts about the Just National Steel Guitar designed for playing just intonation.

Less than two weeks after writing that piece, I found myself taking on an adventurous recording devoted to compositions written around the just intonation system. This was the MicroFest album playfully entitled Just Strings, whose title was also the name of the trio consisting of guitarist John Schneider (who produces the MicroFest recordings), harpist Alison Bjorkedal, and percussionist T.J. Troy. In that context the title of the new MicroFest album, Just National Guitar, suggests that it serves as a “sequel” to Just Strings, exploring the use of just intonation on a different instrument. Currently, this album is available from Amazon.com only for MP3 download; but the download includes a highly informative digital booklet.

Lou Harrison playing a Just National Steel Guitar (from the Just Strings booklet, courtesy of John Schneider)

The entire album consists of solo performances by Schneider on a Just National Steel Guitar. It is organized around the works of two strikingly different composers. It begins with Harrison’s three-movement suite, Scenes from Nek Chand, inspired by the work of an Indian artist of the same name. Harrison chose to compose the piece using a modal scale based on the sixth through twelfth overtones of the harmonic series. Since the “tonic pitches” of the series are those overtones that are powers of two, the result was a gamut that provided the tonic with its “dominant” partner from both below (sixth harmonic) and above (twelfth harmonic).

The Just National guitar was created to provide an instrument with both strong sonorities (metal strings naturally amplified by the body structure of a National Reso-Phonic Steel Tricone guitar) and a fret system that would accommodate the intervals of Harrison’s scale. Scenes from Nek Chand turned out to be Harrison’s final composition, and it was first recorded on a Mode album collecting Harrison’s five suites for guitar. Towards the end of the album, Schneider presents a “new” Harrison suite, this one consisting of six Harrison pieces that predate the Just National instrument arranged for Just National performance by Schneider.

Throughout the album, compositions by Schneider himself, Terry Riley, Tom Johnson, and Carter Scholz are interleaved with the five short movements of a suite by Peter Yates entitled Quips. True to the title, each movement presents a brief quip by a different source. In order of appearance, those sources are Oscar Levant, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka. This requires that Schneider sing in counterpoint with the melodic line he as playing. Schneider rose to this challenge admirably; but I have to confess that, for the most part, I was able to follow the words because I already knew what they were.

Two of the composers on the album, Johnson and Scholz, seemed to be as interested in the mathematical properties of sequences of “overtone integers” as they were in the music that resulted. Both Johnson’s “Rational Melodies” (Schneider performed only seven of the 21 melodies in the collection) and Scholz’ “Almost Square” reminded me of my own student days of playing with sequences of whole numbers that had interesting properties involving different forms of symmetry. (There was a side of me that wanted to do one better than the twelve-by-twelve “grid” representation of the valid forms of a single-twelve tone row.) Both Johnson and Scholz came up with material far more conducive to attentive listening than anything I had managed to conceive.

Riley’s contribution to the album consists of two pieces intended to be part of a longer suite for the Just National instrument. Both involved reflecting on a protest against the outbreak of the war with Iraq initiated by President George W. Bush on March 19, 2003. A protest march down Broad Street in Nevada City, California, prompted the composition of “National Broad Street March;” and that piece was subsequently complemented by “Quando Cosas Malas Caen del Cielo” (when bad things fall from heaven). It is worth noting that some of Riley’s earliest works were created at a time when there were frequent protests against United States involvement in the Vietnam War; but there is a sense in which these 2003 pieces are more explicit in their motives of protest.

Schneider’s own contribution to the album is his Tombo por Lou. This may be approached as a “response” to the “call” of Scenes from Nek Chand; but, as the title suggests, it also serves as a memorial for Harrison himself. That said, when one listens to the two pieces side-by-side (as they are arranged on the album), there is a sense that Schneider chose to pursue overtone-based intervals that were rather more adventurous than those that Harrison preferred. It would be fair to say that Schneider has nodded gracefully as several of the structural forms that one encounters in Harrison’s music. However, those forms are then populated with new approaches to the creation of melodic lines and their accompaniment.

Schneider has arranged the album in such a way that the attentive listener will be guided through a wide variety of different approaches to using a tuning system with origins in Harrison’s desire to work directly with natural overtones. There is so much individuality across the selections that are offered that one is unlikely to dismiss any of them as “more of the same.” More importantly, the album prepares its listeners for the prospect of encountering a Just National instrument played in recital. I have been fortunate to have that experience several times, and I am always looking forward to the next opportunity.

Henry Cowell’s World Music Perspective

Yesterday afternoon I returned to the Noe Valley Ministry for the second of the three concerts being offered by the Bard Music West festival, The World of Henry Cowell. The title of this concert was Living in the Whole World of Music, drawing upon Cowell’s extensive interest in what we now call “world music,” cited briefly in yesterday’s account of the first concert. In addition to diverse selections by Cowell and those in his circle, the program also included a very recent (2015) work by Wang Lu, a Chinese composer from Xi’an now teaching at Brown University.

Across the works presented on the program, there was particular emphasis on percussion. Indeed, the entire performance (presented without an intermission but with short breaks when instruments were rearranged on the stage) was framed by Shahab Paranj performing on tonbak, the principal percussion instrument of Persian music. He began the program with an improvisation and concluded by participating in the performance of Cowell’s four-movement “Homage to Iran.”

However, the primary emphasis on percussion involved coupling Cowell’s “Return” with a rather unique collaboration between John Cage and Lou Harrison called simply “Double Music.” This latter was performed by the quartet of percussionists Ben Paysen, Mika Nakamura, Sam Rich, and Tim Padgett. “Return” required only three percussionists and was played by Paysen, Rich, and Padgett.

“Double Music,” which received its first performance in San Francisco in 1941, was the product of an innovative experiment with engaging results. It was decided in advance that the entire piece would consist of 200 four-beat measures. It was also determined that the percussion instruments would be grouped into four “voices,” specified as soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. Cage and Harrison then proceeded to write parts for these voices independently, Cage writing for soprano and tenor, while Harrison took alto and bass. Each part was given to a single percussionist with specification of the necessary instruments; and, because the beat was both simple and steady, they could perform without a conductor. No dynamics are specified in the score.

By 1941 Cage had developed considerable experience in working more with rhythm than with pitch. He would explore structures based on patterns of integer groups, dealing only with a single pulse and different ways to divide or multiply it systematically. Harrison’s approach, however, seems to have been more intuitive. Nevertheless, the simple act of superposition resulted in a fabric as intriguing as some of the thicker webs of Renaissance polyphony, all expressed by nothing more than the interleaving of a generous diversity of rhythmic patterns.

Cowell’s “Return,” on the other hand, came across as more spontaneous and was apparently written to be played by dancers as part of the choreography. Cowell was also far more specific about the dynamics, using sharp contrasts as a key expressive element. It probably would have been more interesting to observe how this music emerged as a byproduct of dance, but the performance by last night percussionists still endowed the score with a compelling account based only on its sonic qualities.

Spontaneity also emerged as a key element in “Homage to Iran.” There was a clear sense that many of the extended discursive passages by both Paranj’s tonbak and the violin part, played by Luosha Fang, were either improvised or based on improvisations that were then notated. Allegra Chapman then provided what amounted to a continuo from the piano. The piece was structured as two Andante rubato movements in which the piano provided context for extended violin work. These were separated by a tonbak solo, and all the instruments come together only in the final Con spirito movement. Fang and Chapman also performed Carlos Chávez’ 1924 sonatina, which was probably the most conventionally lyrical work on the program. Those familiar with Chávez’ other compositions could probably pick up some familiar tropes, some of which most likely reflected the composer’s interest in Mexican folk styles.

The only Cowell selection without percussion came from a piece written in 1924 called simply “Ensemble.” This was originally scored for string quintet and thunder sticks, but he subsequently eliminated the thunder sticks. Michael Nicolas played the Adagio movement, which was written as a cello solo.

Nicolas was visiting from New York will his colleagues in the chamber ensemble Third Sound: Sooyun Kim on flute, Romie de Guise-Langlois on clarinet, Karen Kim on violin, and Orion Weiss on piano. Conducted by Patrick Castillo, the group played Wang’s Urban Inventory. This is a suite in six movements that reflects on the nature of urban life in contemporary China. That sense of context is reinforced by recordings of city sounds that provide occasional background textures for the instrumental parts.

Several of the movement titles are playfully cryptic. The most amusing of these is “(Dream of the) red chamber,” which seems to be mocking synthesis of the highly traditional Dream of the Red Chamber and the jingoist ballet Red Detachment of Women, which thrived under the notorious Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong. That word game suggested that much of the music may have involved some subtle coding of thoughts about current life in China, but it would take more than one listening experience to begin to catch on to those codes.

PIVOT Celebrates Lou Harrison’s Legacy

Pianist Sarah Cahill, arranger of last night's concert (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Composer Lou Harrison’s 100th birthday was on May 14, 2017; and last season offered an abundance of opportunities to learn about and appreciate Harrison’s works and life, which had ended at the age of 85 on February 2, 2003. The most extensive of these efforts was the two-concert series presented as Other Minds 22 under the title Just 100: Homage to Lou Harrison. However, his music was also presented by the San Francisco Symphony in both a subscription concert (entitled Music for a Modern Age) and a Sunday afternoon chamber music recital that included Harrison’s “Varied Trio.” San Francisco Contemporary Music Players contributed with a three-concert festival entitled Lou Harrison: A Centenary Celebration, which explored Harrison’s impact on the present as well as his own music. In addition to these many performance opportunities, Indiana University Press published an impressively comprehensive biography, Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick, written jointly by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell.

Fortunately, that celebratory spirit has reverberated into the current season. This was strikingly evident this past November when the China National Center for the Performing Arts Orchestra and its Music Director and Chief Conductor Lü Jia included Harrison’s concerto for pipa on the program they presented at Davies Symphony Hall. Last night, with May 14, 2018 just beginning to come into view, an all-Harrison program was presented by San Francisco Performances for the second program in this week’s four-concert PIVOT festival. The program was prepared by pianist Sarah Cahill, who shared the stage with violinist Kate Stenberg, the members of the Alexander String Quartet (violinists Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, violist Paul Yarbrough, and cellist Sandy Wilson), and the William Winant Percussion Group, along with a brief appearance by Sophia Shen playing pipa.

The standard catalog of Harrison’s compositions (which is included as an Appendix in the Alves-Campbell biography) was compiled by Leta Miller and Frederic Lieberman. It has 313 entries running from an elegy for solo piano composed in 1927 to “To Honor Mark Bullwinkle,” composed for Javanese gamelan in 2002. There are any number of reasons why it is unlikely that there will ever be a comprehensive account of this catalog; but its breadth practically guarantees that any all-Harrison concert is likely to turn up at least one selection that will be new for each member of the audience. In my case the only familiar selection was the performance of “Varied Trio” by Cahill, Stenberg, and Winant, whom I had previously heard play this piece in November of 2016. Everything else on the program was a “first contact” experience; and I must confess that I felt like a kid in a candy store.

Cahill opened the program with her only solo performance, the three-movement suite A Summerfield set, consisting of a sonata, a ground, and the concluding “Round for the triumph of Alexander.” The piece was named for Susan Summerfield, the harpsichordist who arranged a teaching position for Harrison at Mills College; and the piece can be played by either piano or harpsichord. The piece was one of several on the program that drew attention to Harrison’s contrapuntal skills, which always struck an imaginative balance between traditional practices and strikingly original sonorities. That technique was equally evident in the five-movement “String Quartet Set,” for which Lifsitz recalled Harrison’s coaching when the Alexander played the piece at San Francisco State University. In this piece also counterpoint is thrown into an entirely new light through Harrison’s imaginative definitions of rhythm through “delay” techniques, suggesting an ancient practice in which one player would follow another’s lead.

Most of the program, however, was devoted to the thoroughly cosmopolitan approach to percussion sonorities presented by Winant and his Percussion Group of students. As may be guessed from his pipa concerto, Harrison was a passionate advocate for world music long before that phrase became part of working vocabulary for the rest of us. Where percussion was involved, this often entailed finding the right media to produce the right sounds by digging around in junk yards. As a result, he could evoke an Aztec spirit for “Song of Quetzalcoatl,” whose instrumentation was far from “authentic” but whose impact was no less compelling. On the other hand, for the threnody piece he wrote in memory of the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez, he chose to accompany a poignant viola line with the subdued subtlety of Javanese gamelan practices.

The evening as a whole ran about two hours without an intermission. However, the diversity of Harrison’s compositions was so great that there was “never a dull moment.” As we near the end of Harrison’s centennial year, it was hard to avoid feeling that this evening had a bit of a valedictory feel to it. For my part, however, I took it as a reminder of just how extensive and broad are the selections in the Harrison catalog. I, for one, would be just as happy were these regular occasions to visit those selections continue with just as much dedication and imagination even after the calendar has crossed Harrison’s 101st birthday!

Details Announced for SFP PIVOT Festival

This past July this site explained that the innovative PIVOT series, launched by San Francisco Performances (SFP) in March of 2016, would be presented in a new festival format. The series would again consist of four performances, but they would all take place during the final week of January. In addition, there would be a single venue, the Strand Theater, which is located at 1127 Market Street, between 7th Street and 8th Street; and all performances would begin at 8:30 p.m. As of last July, all the performers had been determined; but program details have not yet been released. Those details are now available as follows:

Tuesday, January 23: The L.A. Dance Project is an “interdisciplinary” dance company (based in Los Angeles) co-founded by choreographer Benjamin Millepied, composers Nico Muhly and Nicholas Britell, art consultant Matthieu Humery, and producer Charles Fabius. The program will involve an intriguing mix of “live” and recorded performances. The opening selection will be Millepied’s pas de deux “Closer.” Millepied set his choreography to Philip Glass’ “Mad Rush,” which will be performed “live” by Timo Andres (who will return later in the festival to give a solo recital). “Closer” will be followed by the film version of Millepied’s “Hearts & Arrows,” which has Glass’ third (“Mishima”) string quartet as its soundtrack. The final selection will be Millepied’s “Sarabande,” performed by a small male ensemble to selected movements by Johann Sebastian Bach taken from the BWV 1013 solo flute partita in A minor and the six sonatas and partitas from solo violin (BWV 1001–1006).

Wednesday January 24: This will be a celebration honoring composer Lou Harrison, whose 100th birthday was recognized last year. The program has been prepared by pianist Sarah Cahill, who will be working with violinist Kate Stenberg, the members of the Alexander String Quartet (violinists Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, violist Paul Yarbrough, and cellist Sandy Wilson), and the William Winant Percussion Group. (Winant was one Harrison’s close colleagues.) The program will be as follows:

• Summerfield Set (1988)
• Varied Trio (1986)
• String Quartet Set (1978)
• Song of Quetzalcoatl (1941)
• Threnody for Carlos Chavez (1978)
• Music for Violin with Various Instruments (1967)

Friday, January 26: Andres will return to present a solo piano recital of (in his words) “works based on visual images, either real of imagined.” Three currently active composers will be featured: Caroline Shaw (“Gustave le Gray”), Eric Shanfield (“Utopia Parkway”), and Christopher Cerrone (“The Arching Path”).These pieces will be framed by selections from Leoš Janáček’s cycle of fifteen piano pieces collected under the title On an Overgrown Path.

Saturday, January 27: The festival will conclude with the SFP debut of the Joe Goode Performance Group, which is based here in San Francisco. Goode will present a “progress report” of Still Standing, a full-evening work that will receive its world premiere this coming June at the Haas-Lilienthal House. The work addresses communities subjected to persecution, Jewish immigrants and LGBT, both of which found “safe haven” in San Francisco. Goode is working with composers Shawna Virago and Lila Blue on this project. The company will also perform excerpts from “Hush.”

Those wishing to attend all four events will be able to purchase a PIVOT Festival Pass for $90. These may be obtained online through a City Box Office event page or by calling the SFP Box Office at 415-392-2545, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Single tickets are available for $25 and $40 for premium seating. (All Festival Pass tickets are for premium seating.) These may also be purchased online from City Box Office, using the hyperlinks on the dates given above, or by calling SFP. Single tickets will also be sold at the door.

Chinese Visitors Bring Dazzling Harrison to Davies

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony hosted the debut visit of the China National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) Orchestra led by its Music Director and Chief Conductor (also NCPA Artistic Director of Music) Lü Jia, also making his debut under SFS auspices. Lü prepared a well-conceived “East Meets West” program, which included his own acknowledgement of this being the year of composer Lou Harrison’s 100th birthday, which took place this past May 14. Harrison’s memory was honored with a performance of his concerto for pipa, which was composed about twenty years ago.

Wu Man performing with her pipa (from Wikimedia Commons, photograph by Michael Coghlan, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

The concerto was written for Wu Man (pictured above), who has established herself as a leading virtuoso pipa player and has frequently appeared as guest artist in recitals given by the Kronos Quartet. If “East Meets West” was the overall theme of Lü’s program, then it was also the theme of Harrison’s concerto. As was frequently the case over his lifetime, Harrison created a goulash of impressions of different cultures from around the world, all delivered with an ebullient rhetoric suggesting the fiery spices that characterize that Hungarian stew. Indeed, the entire concerto is practically a goulash within a goulash, so to speak, since its second movement, entitled “Bits and Pieces” amounts to a four-movement suite of miniature impressions, each reflecting a decidedly different culture.

It is within this suite that the pipa has the one opportunity to celebrate its ancient Chinese roots. (The instrument goes back at least as far as the Han Dynasty, which flourished during the second century.) The title of that movement is “Wind and Plum;” and it was clear that, through working with Wu, Harrison cultivated a perceptive impression of the pipa’s historical roots. The other “Bits and Pieces” movements evoked the sonorities of the balalaika (“Troika”), mandolin (“Neapolitan”), and, in the case of “Three Sharing,” the percussive sounds of knocking on the bodies of the pipa, the cello, and the bass. However, for all of that diversity, the instrumental accompaniment for the entire concerto was limited solely to the string section.

“Bits and Pieces” was followed by “Threnody for Richard Locke,” whose rhetoric is decidedly contemporary Western, after which the concerto closed by reflecting back on the Europe of the late Middle Ages with an “Estampie” movement. Only the opening Allegro seems to have been conceived the let this concerto be a concerto, so to speak. Nevertheless, the overall listening experience was a joyride through its wide diversity of styles and rhetorics; and Harrison was never shy about providing Wu with virtuoso challenges that would reinforce her reputation for mastering every detail of her instrument. Lest anyone dare to question that reputation by the end of the concerto, Wu turned to the more traditional repertoire for her encore, playing “White Snow in Spring.”

Harrison’s concerto was preceded by the one composition on the program by a Chinese composer Qigang Chen. “Luan Tan” (which can be translated as “chaotic music” or “random notes”) was written on a joint commission by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, and Radio France; and it was given its world premiere by the Hong Kong Philharmonic in 2015. Last night the China NCPA Orchestra gave the piece its first West Coast performance.

Whether or not Chen was inspired by the mathematics behind chaos theory in creating “Luan Tan,” it was clear that, through either calculation or intuition, he homed in on the abstraction of what might be called “absolute unpredictability.” The very opening gestures comes from a pair of temple blocks, which provocatively avoid establishing any sense of rhythm and emerge only as a series of punctuations, all of which seem to take place at unexpected moments. That rhetorical device then spreads over the entire ensemble, applying itself not only to subsequent punctuations but also to thematic lines, both those that churn around a small cluster of notes and those that arch their way over an extended melody, as uncertain in its origin as it is in its cadencing.

As absorbing was the music itself, just as absorbing was the very appearance of every member of the ensemble. Conductor and crew were all intensely focused on the meticulous detail that had gone into Chen’s score. The entire group clearly shared the understanding that this composition would “work” only if every individual knew exactly how to fit his/her part into the overall whole. Lü could not have been a better informed leader of this group, always aware of when to focus on a particular part and when to provide guidance for that overall whole.

This was the ensemble’s opening work. They certainly knew how to seize audience attention. Once they established command of it, those of us on the other side of the proscenium were ready for anything.

If the first half of the program provided a stimulating serving of modernism, the second half was devoted to the nineteenth century. The only work scheduled to be performed was Johannes Brahms Opus 98 (fourth) symphony in E minor. The performance made it clear that Lü understood nineteenth-century romanticism as firmly as he understood the last half-century of modernism. Furthermore, he made it clear that his appreciation of Brahms was just as passionate as his engagement with music from the more recent past.

Nevertheless, there seemed to be at least a bit of a problem with being too passionate about Brahms. Lü clearly wanted to savor every moment in each of the symphony’s four movements. However, that savoring never recognized the rhetorical requirement that each movement should be organized around a single climax, as should the symphony when considered in its entirety. To apply my favorite metaphor, there never seemed to be a sense of the peak that rose above all the others, neither in any single movement nor in the symphony as a whole. Thus, while the attentive listener could easily grasp the depth of Lü’s emotional engagement, there tended to be a lack of the overall direction according to which the score would navigate from one depth to another.

On the other hand Lü’s decision to take the orchestral version of the sixth of Brahms’ Hungarian dances as an encore managed quite well over its own brief duration. Indeed, there was almost a Looney Tunes quality in Lü’s madcap approach to racing from one theme to another. Yet, for all the familiarity of those themes, Lü knew exactly how to endow them with a unique freshness in his execution. He then followed up with more traditional Chinese music (presumably arranged for full orchestra), which clearly won over the hearts of the audiences as effectively as Wu’s encore had done.

Two Generations of Just Intonation Composers on MicroFest

I have not written about MicroFest Records since the first round of releases came out in the final quarter of 2015. However, as result of my recent interest in Lou Harrison’s interest in the use of just intonation and recent appearance of the Partch ensemble on the album Color Theory released by the PRISM Quartet, I have been seeking out listening experiences involving intervals based on integer ratios. My quest took me to another early MicroFest release entitled Just Strings, which couples several of Harrison’s pieces with two works by John Luther Adams. Harrison sat on a jury that gave Adams a composition award in 1973, the year in which he graduated from the California Institute of the Arts; and Harrison would subsequently become both role model and friend to Adams.

The album is named after a trio of members of Partch. These are guitarist John Schneider, who founded Partch, harpist Alison Bjorkedal, and percussionist T.J. Troy. The name (clearly) does not refer to all members playing string instruments. Instead, it refers to the group playing music written in just intonation with all strings tuned to provide intervals based on integer ratios.

The Adams selections are two suites of five dances each, based on songs in two of the indigenous languages of North America, Athabaskan and Yup’ik. In both of these collections, Adams uses the simplest approach to tuning that involves more than the octave: All intervals involve ratios of integers constructed from multiples of 2 and 3. Such an approach is sometimes called Pythagorean tuning.

The Harrison pieces, on the other hand, are far more diverse in both tuning and styles. Much of the album is devoted to his two harp suites, neither of which were initially conceived as such. The first suite is a collection of pieces composed between 1952 and 1977, and the second consists of works composed between 1951 and 1992. The album also includes “Lyric Phrases,” composed in 1972, and “In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel,” composed in 1991.

A significant percentage of the tracks on this album were recorded for the very first time. That includes the entirety of the two Adams collections. Two of the tracks, one movement from the second harp suite and the Handel homage, also involve accompaniment by the Harvey Mudd College American Gamelan.

In contrast to the Adams selections, every one of the Harrison tracks involves a different tuning system. (These are all enumerated with all of the corresponding interval ratios in the booklet essay provided by Bill Alves.) It is thus no surprise that, when Meredith Clark played Harrison’s music in the second concert of the Other Minds 22 festival entitled Just 100: Homage to Lou Harrison, she played only one solo selection on a diatonic harp, the “Threnody to the Memory of Oliver Daniel,” which was included in the second suite.

Why should there be such diversity in tuning? While Alves’ booklet notes focus the attention on “the sweet harmonies that result” from integer-based tuning, my guess is that both Harrison and Adams were as interested in departures from our expectations as they were in having consonances that were … more consonant. As was previously observed, such a departure was most evident when Britten explicitly called for the thirteenth harmonic in the solo horn fanfare that begins his Opus 31 serenade. In Adams’ system, which is based on C, the initial semitone to C-sharp is clearly audible as different from the equal-tempered semitone. Similar differences are also evident in some of Harrison’s favorite ratios, including 5:4 (the major third) and 7:4 (the minor seventh). (There is some argument over whether 7:4 is the “blue” seventh, which supposedly originated in the Mississippi Delta and found its way into jazz. I am not knowledgeable enough to offer a considered opinion; but I am pretty confident that, when I am listening to recordings of Bessie Smith, she is not singing equal-tempered intervals, regardless of what her pianist may be doing!)

Both Harrison and Adams seem to have come to their interest in using integer ratios from a common source, the recognition that, when we consider cultures other than our own and think, instead, in terms of “world music,” there is nothing “sacred” about equal-tempered tuning. This is not to imply that Western music is some sort of “outlier” in its use of equal temperament. Harrison’s interest in Indonesian music led him to the slendro, a pentatonic scale in which all of the intervals were very close to identical. In 1960 he followed up on that discovery by writing a “Concerto in Slendro,” scored for violin, two tack pianos, celesta, and percussion. In addition Harrison realized that music he wrote on commission would inevitably involve performers whose listening was biased in favor of equal temperament.

Thus, the Harrison selections on this album reflect pieces he wrote to satisfy his own interests. For example, “Music for Bill and Me,” which is in the first harp suite, was written in such a way that he and William Colvig, his life partner, could play it as a duet on diatonic harps. The Adams collections, on the other hand, can probably be taken as the results of “field studies,” similar to those conducted by Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók in Eastern Europe. The value of this album is that, through the wide diversity of its relatively short tracks, it acclimates the “mind behind the ear” to accept these “unconventional” intervals as just another approach to “being natural.” Those willing to approach those tracks with attentive listening may find themselves listening to more “traditional” equal-tempered compositions with a new perspective.

SFP Plans a New Approach to its PIVOT Series

PIVOT: New Adventures in the Performing Arts, a new “alternative” concert series launched by San Francisco Performances (SFP) in March of 2016, will not begin its new season until January of next year. While the series is still driven by a philosophy of innovation, creativity, and artistic excellence that pushes the boundaries of the traditional concert experience, the third season will take a new approach to tactics. The season has been planned as an intensive five-day exploration with all four of its concerts taking place during the final week of January of 2017.

This time the Strand Theater, which is located at 1127 Market Street, between 7th Street and 8th Street, will host the entire season. All performances will begin at 8:30 p.m. Program details have not yet been announced. However, the contributing performers will be as follows:

Tuesday, January 23: The series will begin with the L.A. Dance Project, a dance company founded in 2012 along distinctively interdisciplinary lines. The founding choreographer is dancer Benjamin Millepied. However, two of the other founders are composers: Nico Muhly and Nicholas Britell. The other two founders are art consultant Matthieu Humery and producer Charles Fabius. The company will draw upon a diverse repertory to prepare the program they present.

Wednesday, January 24: Pianist Sarah Cahill will lead a celebration honoring Lou Harrison as the 100th year since his birth draws to a close. She will be joined by one of Harrison’s close colleagues, percussionist William Winant. Winant’s Percussion Group will perform on instruments that were designed and constructed by Harrison and his life partner William Colvig. The members of the Alexander String Quartet (violinists Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, violist Paul Yarbrough, and cellist Sandy Wilson) will also participate.

Friday, January 26: Pianist and composer Timo Andres will present a program inspired by visual patterns, which will include works by American composers Caroline Shaw, Christopher Cerrone, and Eric Shanfield, along with his own pieces.

Saturday, January 27: The series will conclude with the Joe Goode Performance Group giving a “progress report” of a new work based on the idea of storytelling through song.

This will be the first season in which the entire PIVOT Series will be available as a subscription. Subscription prices will be $90 and $144 for premium seating. All seats will be general admission, but the premium section will be at the front of the Orchestra and in the three side boxes. Subscriptions may be purchased online through a City Box Office event page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Single tickets will go on sale on July 31.