A Showcase of Two SFCM Composers

The title of last night’s Faculty Artist Series recital, held in the Sol Joseph Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), was A Composition Collaboration. That was because it featured two of the SFCM composition teachers, David Garner and MaryClare Brzytwa, creator of the Technology and Applied Composition program. Collaboration involved only one of the seven pieces on the program (not including Brzytwa’s “Entrance Music,” which, unless I am mistaken, was not actually realized); but the program served up one of the more diverse offerings of new and recent compositions.

Ironically, the most compelling work on the program was the oldest, “Dhurga Dances,” a composition for two pianos that Garner composed in 1998. The pianists were Garner’s colleague from Ensemble for These Times. Dale Tsang, and SFCM pianist-in-residence Keisuke Nakagoshi. Dhurga is a Hindu goddess, but Garner’s music did not dwell on familiar Indian idioms. However, it seemed to have been inspired by elaborately developed rhythmic patterns that one encounters not only in ragas but also in other cultures based in both West Africa and Latin America. It also seemed to involve a macrostructure derived from the Fibonacci sequence, but far too much was happening in the melodic lines emerging from the four performing hands to allow the listener much time to worry about counting beats or measures. Ultimately, “Dhurga Dances” was a stimulating bundle of energy that never fell back on any predictable clichés and held the attention of the serious listener consistently from beginning to end.

“Dhurga Dances” was the final work on the program and definitely the most rewarding. Tsang also played the world premiere of Garner’s Expressions: Five Ricercars on the names of Expressionist painters, which he completed last year. This is a suite of five movements, each of which has a theme derived from translating the letters of a painter’s name into a sequence of pitches. Those names are Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Maria Blanchard, and Ego Schiele. True to the overall title, each piece evolves through contrapuntal techniques of imitative polyphony, each unfolding its own characteristic approach to overall structure. The five pieces were relatively brief and often witty, probably reflecting the ludic spirit that Garner brought to this particular composition project.

Less compelling was another suite, Cuadro Cuadrangulos (four quadrangles): Four Dances for Four Horns. This was commissioned by the all-horn quartet QUADRE. Each of the movements was based on a different Afro-Cuban dance form. Sadly, while the rhythmic energy of each of those movements had a well-defined dance spirit, there was more uniformity across the movements than one would have anticipated. Some of that uniformity may have been a consequence of the limited range of sonorities afforded by the four QUADRE players (Amy Jo Rhine, Lydia Van Dreel, Nathan Pawelek, and Daniel Wood). Sadly, on the technical side the group was not at their best. The French horn is not the most cooperative of instruments; but last night there seemed to be more problems with intonation and phrasing than one would have liked to experience.

All of Brzytwa’s offerings, on the other other, amounted to selections of tape music, played in darkness in the Recital Hall. My composition teacher specialized in making tape music, primarily for choreographers; and, as a result, most of my own early efforts (not that there were any later ones worth noting) also involved tape music. More recently I have occasionally tried to revive youthful memories by getting over to one of the concerts in the annual San Francisco Tape Music Festival.

What troubled me last night was an overall impression that there was nothing I had not previously encountered back in the late Sixties. Clearly, the technology has improved substantially. (My own contribution to the mix involved thinking in terms of systems involving multiple programs running in parallel with control operations handling matters of coordination.) The irony is that, while recent technology may have pushed back the boundaries of expressiveness, the expressions themselves do not venture very far from pioneering efforts by John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Brian Eno, and others too numerous to mention. Even in Garner’s collaborative project with Brzytwa, which involved both piano (Garner) and flute (Brzytwa) added to synthesized sound, neither the content nor the expressive rhetoric ever managed to get beyond the same-old-same-old of half a century ago.