Last night at the ODC B.Way Theater, the duo that calls itself The Living Earth Show launched its 2018–19 season with a program entitled American Music. For those unfamiliar with this pair, the performers are guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson, both of whom are not only thoroughly skilled at their instruments but also proficiently adept at mastering alternative techniques. The program title could not have been more appropriate for these highly-charged times. It was explained by a single sentence at the top of the program book:
A concert of works written for The Living Earth Show by a collection of vital living composers, each of whom was born in, immigrated to, or utilizes the musical traditions created within the current borders of the United States.
The program took in nine such composers, five of whom were born in the United States. Of the remaining four, two were from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Luciano Chessa from Italy and Sabba Aminikia from Iran, one was “north of the border,” Nicole Lizée from Saskatchewan, and one was from within our borders, Raven Chacon, born in Navajo Nation. Equally diverse was the gear that both players brought to the performance area. Andrews had about half a dozen guitars (one of which was a “standard” acoustic instrument), including one with twice as many frets to enable the playing of quarter-tones. Meyerson addressed that latter issue by having two vibraphones, one of which had all of its bars shaved down a quarter-tone. Meyerson’s gear also included about half a dozen electric toothbrushes, Dennis Aman’s Jellyphones, built from chucks of Jello-O, and a cast iron sink filled with broken glass.
As might be expected, this was a concert in which the visual experience was as stimulating as the auditory. Nevertheless, for all of the theatrical elements, the music was always primary; and each of the composers brought a unique voice to his/her contribution. Mind you, some of those contributions had been deliberately conceived to push the boundaries of audience expectations; but this was an evening that was right up there with any string quartet recital or concert by the San Francisco Symphony (which happened to be taking place at exactly the same time as this performance).
For my part I have been following Living Earth since April of 2012, when they presented one of the recitals in the 2012 Tangents Contemporary Guitar Series. I was hooked almost immediately; and, since then, I have done my best to keep up with both their performances and their recordings. As a result, I took a certain amount of comfort in the fact that three of the pieces on the program were familiar to me.
In order of “initial exposure,” the earliest of these was the last work on the program, Chessa’s “Inkless Imagination.” This was actually a solo piece in which Meyerson attached vibrators (the electric toothbrushes) to a variety of different objects. The piece was performed in total darkness with Andrews following behind Meyerson with a high-powered flashlight. This not only enabled Meyerson to see what he was doing but also allowed the audience to follow both those activities and the shadows cast on the walls. A version of this had been performed at the end of April of 2016 as part of the New Frequencies Fest at YBCA Forum and consisted only of Meyerson’s silent pursuit to elicit subtle sounds. Last night’s performance was framed by the text of a poem by William Wordsworth, “The Boy of Wonder.” One might associate Meyerson’s activities with that sense of “wonder” were it not for the fact that Wordsworth’s boy dies in the final stanza of the poem.
The second experience of recollection came from Lizée’s “Family Sing-A-Long and Game Night.” This was a composition commissioned by The Living Earth Show for the score they provided for Post:Ballet’s full-evening work, Do Be. While that first performance involved only the musicians and the dancers, last night’s excerpt dwelled entirely on the “audience participation” element of the composition, allowing Andrews to turn the affair into a real audience sing-a-long, at least for those with enough breath to hold a note across wildly sustained percussion cadenzas taken by Meyerson. This was last night’s opening selection, making it clear that this was a concert in which listening did not have to be a deadly serious intellectual pursuit.
The most recent of the pieces I knew came from an encounter a little over a year ago, when San Francisco Performances launched their new Hear Now and Then Series with “Echoes,” a one-hour spoken-word chamber opera. “Could never tell you East from West…” was the contribution of Youth Speaks poet Ashley Smiley, who joined Living Earth to give a reprise performance. Danny Clay provided the music that accompanied Smiley’s recitation. Hers evocation of disorientation within the San Francisco city limits seems to have become more relevant after a year has elapsed, particularly at a time when the city is having trouble with both homelessness and forces of nature making the air virtually unbreathable.
Not all of the works on the program were strictly original. Aminikia’s “Torkaman” was an arrangement of a solo for the tar, a six-stringed Persian instrument, composed by Hossein Alizadeh. Both Andrews and Meyerson had their own contributions to the melody line (the latter on vibraphone). However, the driving spirit of the rhythms of the theme were never compromised, making the arrangement an homage to, as the composer put it, “a landmark of Persian classical music.”
Timo Andres, on the other hand, provided an arrangement of a far more familiar landmark, Ludwig van Beethoven’s WoO 59 “Für Elise.” This began as an impressively adept rendering of Beethoven’s piano score on Meyerson’s vibraphone. However, as the arrangement progressed, quarter-tones “invaded” both the melodic line and its accompaniment. Meyerson’s management of his “double vibraphone” was as fascinating to watch as the “invading” quarter-tones were rhetorically powerful. The result was a throughly amusing rethinking of music too often dismissed as cliché.
As to the “first contact” experiences, there were so many of them that memory cannot do justice to all of them. The Jellyphones clearly stood out during the evening. They figured in one prelude and one fugue from Aman’s major cycle of 24 prelude-fugue couplings. (The prelude and the fugue selected for last night came from different pairs.) It was particularly interesting to consider how Aman could take such a rigidly traditional concept of fugue and repurpose it to reflect its imitative and episodic qualities without being tied down to the tonal relationship between fugue subject and response. Indeed, the couplings seem to be distinguished by sharing instances of a variety of different tuning systems, making for an approach that takes the spirit behind Johann Sebastian Bach’s prelude-fugue project and endows it with entirely new, and quite engaging, flesh.
The compositions by Chacon and Lynee Breedlove, on the other hand, seemed to be based on more political foundations. They deserve further listening; but, on “first contact,” it was a bit difficult to sort the music out from the agenda. More interesting was Christopher Cerrone’s attempt to develop a “landscape” composition in “Double Happiness.” This was inspired by field recordings made in the Italian countryside, and it was definitely the most pastoral contribution to the program. Ultimately, however, this was a lot of music for a single recital; and I hope that some of my new encounters will be followed by opportunities for second hearings.
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