Four LCCE Players Visit SF Public Library

Early yesterday evening, as part of its Workshops & Education program, the Main branch of the San Francisco Public Library hosted a visit by four of the members of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE). They presented a one-hour program entitled Deep Ecology and Deep Listening. This began with a piano trio performance of “Tree/Peace” by Pauline Oliveros, played by violinist Anna Presler, Leighton Fong on cello, and pianist Allegra Chapman. Only one other selection involved more than one performer, Amy Beach’s “Romance,” which was scored for violin and piano.

Hildegard of Bingen with nuns, possibly leading them in chant (source unknown, public domain, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

Stacey Pelinka delivered two solo flute performances, which were as engaging as they were contrasting. The first of these was an instrumental account of the monodic chant of Hildegard of Bingen: “O viridissima virga, Ave.” The absence of voice detracted from the rich semantics of the text, but Pelinka’s account of the vocal line was both compelling and engaging. This contrasted sharply with her account of “Ainava ar putniem” (landscape with bird), composed by Pēteris Vasks, a bold effort to capture natural sounds through a solo instrument. This was preceded by another recent European selection, “Nocturne,” composed for solo violin by Kaija Saariaho in 1994. The solo piano offering was “Ice Calf” by Monica Chew, who is currently based in Oakland.

Whether or not this program reflected ecological connotations (or denotations) was left as an exercise for the listener. Personally, I was more inclined to reflect on the music, rather than the titles. I was particularly struck by the sensitivity of the contemporary composers’ efforts to explore diversities of sonorities, and I was impressed by how the LCCE players rose to the challenges of those sonorities. Taken as a whole, this was an hour well spent venturing into unfamiliar territories.

SFPL to Host Free LCCE Concert

The LCCE musicians that will perform at SFPL: Allegra Chapman (piano), Stacey Pelinka (flute), Leighton Fong (cello), and Anna Presler (violin) (photographs by Miles Caliboso and Bonnie Rae Mills, from the SFPL event page for the concert being discussed)

At the end of this month, the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) will host a performance by members of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) as part of their Workshops & Education program. The Main branch of the Library, which is located in the Civic Center, a short walk from City Hall, will present a concert entitled Deep Ecology and Deep Listening. Each of the four selections on the program will involve the exploration of innovative sonorities, conceived to reflect different aspects of the natural world.

The program will begin with “Tree/Peace,” which Pauline Oliveros composed for violin, cello, and piano, making it one of her most conventional approaches to instrumentation. This will be followed by the solo piano composition “Ice Calf” by Monica Chew, who is currently based in Oakland. While Oliveros was one of the most adventurous composers of the last century, “Ice Calf” was given its first performance on June 26, 2021. The program will then lapse back into the twentieth century with a solo violin performance of “Nocturne,’ composed by Kaija Saariaho in 1994. The final work on the program will be “Ainava ar putniem” (landscape with birds), written for solo flute by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks (who happens to be my senior by only about three months).

SFPL has created a Web page for this event. It will begin at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 31. The entire program will be performed without intermission and is expected to last for 45 minutes. SFPL does not charge for admission to any of its facilities or events (of course).

Final Cahill Survey of Women Composers

courtesy of Jensen Artists

This coming Friday First Hand Records will release the last of the three volumes that pianist Sarah Cahill prepared for her The Future is Female Series. Readers that have been following these releases know that each album had its own title: In Nature for the first and The Dance for the second. The title of the final volume is At Play. Once again, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders; and, again as of this writing, the album will be available only for digital download. [added 4/25, 4:15 p.m.:  Fortunately, the physical CD is being sold through a Barnes & Noble Web page, which will process pre-orders prior to this coming Friday.]

Another “once again” is that Cahill begins her “program” in the seventeenth century. This time her selection is the third sonata in the Opus 5 collection of keyboard sonatas composed by Hélène de Montgeroult. There is a bit of fortuitous serendipity here where Cahill’s agenda is concerned. The week after I wrote about The Dance I wrote an article about Montgeroult prompted by the release of Clare Hammond’s album of the 29 études that Montgeroult had composed. On that occasion I cited the Grand Piano album that Nicolas Horvath had recorded of the complete set of Montgeroult sonatas. (There were only nine of them, and Cahill’s selection for At Play was the last of them.)

Another similarity that At Play shares with The Dance is that there is only one selection from the nineteenth century. This time the composer is Cecile Chaminade; and the selection is her “Thème varié,” which she composed in 1898. Where my own listening is concerned, I find this track to be more consistent with the sense of “play” suggested by the album title; and the music differs refreshingly from Clara Schumann’s Opus 20 set of variations included on The Dance.

The remainder of the album consists of three tracks of twentieth-century compositions, followed by four works completed in the current century. Two of those latter compositions are multi-movement suites. The first of these is Hannah Kendall’s On the Chequer’d Field Array’d, and the second is Regina Harris Baiocchi’s collection of four pieces under the title Piano Poems. Kendall’s intention was to depict the three stages in a game of chess (opening, middle-game, endgame). I have to confess that I have not yet managed to get my head around this suite, leaving me wondering if composing music about chess is in the same league as dancing about architecture.

I have to say that my biggest surprise turned out to be also a favorite selection. My past experiences with Pauline Oliveros involve works that have more to do with activities than with the interpretation of notation. I still remember her remark about going out into the desert in the middle of the night. She could then lay on her back to look at the stars, which would then enable her to perform John Cage’s “Atlas Eclipticalis” by reading the “original score!”

The full title of her contribution to At Play is “Quintuplets Play Pen: Homage to Ruth Crawford.” The music is polyrhythmic, making considerable use of five-notes-to-a-beat quintuplets. Oliveros describes the piece as “a playful polyphonic dance;” and both the sense of play and the intricate Web of polyphony can be grasped by the attentive listener with little difficulty. I hope she enjoyed creating this piece for Cahill, because it means that she might give a few more tries to working with conventional notation! [added 4/25, 4:07 p.m.: I wrote that last sentence unaware of the fact that Oliveros died on November 24, 2016, a painful reminder of how little news about her I had managed to follow.]

Artist Migration to Host Sarah Cahill Recital

Mosaic of Sarah Cahill (lower right corner) and the thirteen composers contribution to her program (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Following up on the release of In Nature, the first of three volumes in her The Future is Female series of recordings, pianist Sarah Cahill will perform a solo recital at Artist Migration in conjunction with the exhibition entitled Women Rising, which will open to the public today. Her program will account for thirteen female composers, only one of whom was included on the In Nature volume: Mary D. Watkins, whose “Summer Days” was given its premiere commercial recording on that album. The program will also include a work familiar to many that have been following Cahill for some time: The West Coast premiere of Teresa Wong’s “She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees,” inspired by a Nina Simone song based on a text by Harlem Renaissance poet William Waring Cuney, took place at an Old First Concerts recital in May of 2019.

The other composers to be represented on Cahill’s Women Rising recital are as follows:

• Regina Harris Baiocchi
• Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou
• Tania León
• Gabriela Ortiz
• Aida Shirazi
• Maggi Payne
• Pauline Oliveros
• Elinor Armer
• Bunita Marcus
• Janice Giteck
• Michelle Li

Some of these names will probably be familiar to those that do their best to keep up with Cahill’s recital performances. For example, Guèbrou is an Ethiopian nun, now 98 years old; and I first encountered her music through a video recording of a recital that Cahill presented at Harrison House in Joshua Tree in August of 2020. On the other hand Armer teaches Composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and her contribution, “Thaw,” was composed in 1975.

The program will also include two “anniversary compositions,” both commissioned by Cahill in 2001 to honor the 100th birthday of Ruth Crawford Seeger: The first of these is Payne’s “Holding Pattern,” inspired by Seeger’s set of nine preludes. “Quintuplets Play Pen,” on the other hand, was composed by Pauline Oliveros; and it marked the first time that she had worked with conventional music notation since the Sixties.

Both the Women Rising exhibition and Cahill’s recital will be presented at 780 Valencia Street in the Mission. The performance will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 24. Tickets are being sold through an Eventbrite event page. The price of tickets for reserved seating is $25. There is also a discount rate of $15 for standing room only.

SFTMF Off to a Delightfully Diverse Start

Last night in the Victoria Theatre, the San Francisco Tape Music Festival (SFTMF) presented the first in its annual schedule of four concerts. For those unfamiliar with the institution, this is still the only festival in the country devoted to the performance of synthesized audio compositions. The word “tape” reflects back on the early days when synthesis involved capturing sounds on audio tape, using technology to transform those recordings, and creating compositions through processes of editing and playback. All of the music on SFTMF programs is now in digital form, manipulated by hardware and software to project each composition onto an array of 24 high-end loudspeakers through real-time analog and digital control.

The earliest composer on the program was Pierre Schaeffer, who first began experimenting with the manipulation and transformation of recorded tapes while working as an engineer for Radiodiffusion Française, now expanded to Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (French radio and television broadcasting, RTF). SFTMF presented one of Schaeffer’s earliest compositions in what would later be known as the “musique concrète” (concrete music) movement. The program included “Étude pathétique,” the last of five études to be broadcast on October 5, 1948 under the title Concert de bruits (concert of noises). The piece was created from recordings of sauce pans, canal boats, singing, speech, harmonica, and piano; and, because of the first of these sources, it also became known as the “Étude aux casseroles.” This was originally a monophonic recording, whose SFTMF projection guided the attentive listener through both the sources and the transformations that constituted Schaeffer’s pioneering work.

The other contribution from the twentieth century was Pauline Oliveros’ 1992 “Poem of Change.” This amounted to her own spoken reflections about sexuality punctuated by “concrete” recordings. Her use of such sources served as a reflection of earlier years, when she served as the first director of the Mills College Tape Music Center. Nevertheless, this was a creation in which the tape music was there to provide a context for Oliveros’ narration of her highly personal prose-poem.

Two of the Azur trains in the Montreal subway system (photograph by Mtlfiredude, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Given the richness of content, I chose to stay for only the first half of last night’s program in the hope that memory would not be overloaded by the diversity of the offerings. The remaining three compositions I experienced were all recent works. The most extensive of these was Robert Normandeau’s “Tunnel azur,” commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Montreal Azur metro system. This system is distinguished by having cars that run on rubber wheels. Nevertheless, Normandeau managed to collect a wide diversity of noises by wandering the tunnels of the system when the cars were out of service. Those noises were then supplemented by the low tones of an octobass, basically a double bass on steroids first created in Paris in 1850. Normandeau called his composition (which he revised in 2018) “a cinema for the ear;” and the intensity of its dynamics made listening a deeply-moving experience. There was similar impact in Maggi Payne’s 2018 “Heat Shield,” which was created on four distinct channels. The intensity of her dynamics provided a reflection (pun intended) of the extreme temperature levels that had to be endured by experimental satellites sent out to collect information about the sun.

In a lighter vein Sangwon Lee’s “Torturing Piano” amounted to a satirical reflection on those extended techniques that require a pianist to play the instrument from the inside. Lee’s stereo tape amounted to a guided tour of those techniques both juxtaposed and superposed. He also inserted a few measures of a Chopin performance to add a sly wink to the seriousness that most pianists bring to their execution of those extended techniques. This was the opening selection on the program, and it allowed listeners to settle into the basic projection technique of the performances before the intensity of the following selections got under way.

Celebrate Beethoven’s Birthday without Beethoven

While there is no documentary support, it is generally assumed that Ludwig van Beethoven was born on December 16, 1770. (The earliest document records his baptism on the following day.) That is a day when classical music broadcasting tends to go overboard in playing Beethoven’s music. Therefore, some may find it a relief that next month, on December 16, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players will offer a free event that will have absolutely nothing to do with Beethoven!
 

Pauline Oliveros’ diagrammatic representation of the nature of listening based on her Sonic Meditations compositions (from the Sonic Meditations entry on The Hum blog)

That event will be Sonic Meditations, the next offering presented under the auspices of the in the COMMUNITY Series. These are performances that break the usual sit-still-and-listen barrier. Instead, the performances encourage audience participation, in this case deemed necessary by the composers of the works being performed. Indeed, the title of the program comes from one of the two composers whose work will be presented, Pauline Oliveros. It refers to a collection of sixteen “social encounters,” all of which explore procedures for (in Oliveros’ words from the second introduction to Sonic Meditations):

1. Actually making sounds
2. Actively imagining sounds
3. Listening to present sounds
4. Remembering sounds

SFCMP will present the third of the pieces in this collection, which, in turn, consists of two parts, “Pacific Tell” and “Telepathic Improvisation.” The “score” for each of these pieces is a set of instructions. Knowledge of music notation is not necessary to follow those instructions, meaning that anyone present as audience is expected to be an actively involved participant.

The other composer being represented will be Cornelius Cardew. He created a piece based on a seven-paragraph treatise by Confucius entitled “The Great Learning.” In this case Cardew does use music notation, but not for all of the paragraphs. Some of the paragraphs specify that they have been composed “For any number of untrained voices.” The final paragraph is one of those pieces, and the score is a set of instructions for how a sequence of words and phrases is to be sung, with intervening periods of humming.

While musical training is not necessary to perform this piece, an understanding of Cardew’s techniques is required. Thus, the performance of the seventh paragraph, which will follow the Oliveros exercise in meditation, will be guided by San Francisco’s resident Cornelius Cardew Choir and its Director Tom Bickley. SFCMP Artistic Director Eric Dudley will serve as “tour guide” for the entire occasion, facilitating both experiencing and participating. While Oliveros says nothing about the amount of time required for any of her meditations, Cardew’s score specified that the performance of the seventh paragraph of “The Great Learning” should last about 90 minutes. (I happen to have a recording of a performance of this paragraph, conducted by Cardew himself; and it lasts only about twenty minutes.)

This event will begin at 3 p.m. on Sunday, December 16. The venue will be The Women’s Building, located in the Mission at 3543 18th Street #8, about halfway between Valencia Street and Guerrero Street. The occasion will also involve festive snacks and chorus-inducing drinks. The event will be free, open to the public, and family friendly. Nevertheless, an RSVP from anyone planning to attend is encouraged. A Web page has been created through which one can specify how many attendees will be covered by that RSVP.