This afternoon the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) presented its only in the COMMUNITY event in its 2019–20 season. Celebration of the Elements was a free event at which only two compositions were performed. Only the first of these, Vivian Fung’s “The Ice is Talking,” could be described as “elemental,” while the second, Jason Treuting’s “How to (Blank)” was an instance of spontaneous composition made by the “community” of audience members joined by two SFCMP performers.
Fung introduced her composition by talking about her regular visits to Jasper National Park every summer to view the glaciers of the Columbia Icefield. This was the trigger for her own environmental awareness when she realized that, on her recent visits, she was seeing far more rock than ice. This inspired her to create a solo percussion composition in which the only percussion “instruments” were three large blocks of ice. Percussionist Haruka Fujii could strike these blocks with slender bamboo sticks using techniques similar to the handling of drumsticks. However, she also engaged metallic objects (such as knives) to scrape the surface of the ice, evoking sounds far different from those created with a drum kit.
As might be expected, the sounds from the ice blocks were highly amplified; and the composition involved mixing those sounds with electronically-created sounds. In addition, the loudspeakers were arrayed in the four corners of the space allocated for both the performer and the audience. Thus, the performance also involved spatial control of the sound sources.
Haruka Fujii working with “non-standard” percussion in a performance with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Mei-Ann Chen (from the photograph gallery Web page on Fujii’s Web site)
This amounted to a rather engaging approach to cultivating environmental consciousness through music. Nevertheless, I have to confess that my mind was almost entirely focused on Fujii’s performance technique. Indeed, I realized that I had not been that focused since those days when I was fortunate enough to attend several solo performances by Max Roach. It was through those experiences that I came to appreciate that one could make percussion music from any number of resources, not all of which could be classified as “musical instruments.” Fujii’s performance reawakened my best memories of Roach at work, and I was delighted to encounter both a performer and a composer with that same breadth of inventiveness that made Roach so memorable.
For “How to (Blank)” Artistic Director Eric Dudley preceded the activity by laying out the rules for audience participation. He explained that there was an overall ABA structure, whose outer sections involved “melodic” lines based on only five pitches, while the inner section consisted of loops. The loops, in turn, were based on a “score” consisting four newspaper headlines for environmental news articles. Individual loops could be structured around single words or several consecutive words. The vowels would be interpreted in terms of those five pitches, while the consonants would be realized as unpitched rhythmic sounds.
As might be guessed, the rules were never quite followed to the letter. As a result there emerged a sort of “cloud of noise” resulting from those rules being ignored. However, within that cloud more “rule-based results” would begin to take root. Thus, the whole experience was entirely good-natured and could not have been more “communal.” Nevertheless, in spite of enjoying a rarely-encountered sense of “community spirit,” I have to say that it was Fujii’s interpretation of Fung’s imaginative composition that has remained most firmly rooted in personal memory.
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