One Found Sound Winds and Brass Rule

Last night at Monument, One Found Sound presented the second of the three concerts in its seventh season, whose overall title is, appropriately enough, Sound of 7. The first concert, Celestial, featured the ensemble’s string players. The title for last night was Chroma, and the focus shifted to the different sonorous colors of wind and brass instruments.

The most colorful of the three pieces performed was the final selection, the 1947 version of Igor Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments.” The original version was written in 1920 for one-to-a-part performance by 24 players of wind and brass instruments. The revision consisted of only 23 separate parts: three flutes, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets, three bassoons (one doubling on contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, and tuba.

This makes for a thick texture of threads of markedly different colors. Indeed, the texture is so thick that even the best of audio technology cannot do justice to it, even at the recording sessions that Stravinsky himself supervised. For example, what appears as dissonance on the printed page is actually superposition of physically separated sound sources; and that sense of separation is lost when the input to 23 different microphones has be compressed onto only two audio tracks. At an actual performance, on the other hand, one is more aware of the spatial effects and the resulting interplay. The 23 players only “come together,” so to speak, during the final chorale, which Stravinsky composed to memorialize Claude Debussy.

Last night was my first encounter with the music in performance. It was certainly more refreshing than any of my past experiences with recordings. It was performed without a conductor, and there was a clear sense of how each member of the ensemble was keenly aware of all the others. My only regret was that it was played only once. (Stravinsky’s recording lasts slightly more than nine minutes.) Just as mind and ears had become acclimated to both the sonorities themselves and their spatial interplay, the piece was over; and I regretted not having an opportunity to listen again with a keener sense of overall orientation.

Dissonance clarified by spatial distribution was also evident in the opening selection, Francis Poulenc’s Suite Française, scored for wind instruments, drum, and harpsichord. The seven movements are arrangements of dance tunes collected by the sixteenth-century French composer Claude Gervaise in a volume entitled Le livre de danceries. Poulenc treated these sources as “popular” (rather than courtly) music; and he deployed his dissonances as a prankish reminder that those who played these old tunes did not always get the notes right. In this performance Poulenc’s playful rhetoric was perfectly clear, meaning that a second round for “deeper listening” was not necessary.

The same could be said of Leoš Janáček’s “Youth,” scored for a sextet of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and bass clarinet. Janáček composed this piece late in life, and it is clear that he was reflecting on his own youth. Thus, over the course of four movements, the attentive listener encounters a broad variety of emotional dispositions, reflecting as many fond memories as painful ones. Recently, my richest contact with Janáček’s music has been through his operas; and I continue to be impressed by his ability to capture the full rhetorical extent of plain and direct prose. That prose-like rhetoric also provides the foundation for “Youth.” These are not the personal reflections of one of the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century. Rather, it is an early twentieth-century frank account of the composer’s past; and Janáček’s prose remains compelling even in the absence of reinforcing text.