Last night in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) presented the in the LABORATORY concert in its 2019–20 season. The title of the program was Kinetic Transformations; and much of the performance involved physical movement, either explicitly or implicitly. Indeed, the guest artist for the concert was the dancer Antoine Hunter, founder and director of the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival; and arrangements were made to accommodate the hearing-impaired throughout the program, including innovative approaches to signing the music while it was being performed.
Hunter also provided choreography for the major work on the program, John Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.” Note that the first word of the title is not a typographical error. Cage conceived this composition as a performance for solo piano that could take place with or without an accompanying ensemble. Cage prepared graphic score pages that were open to highly flexible interpretation for flute, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, tuba, 3 violins, 2 violas, cello, bass; but those resources could be deployed in any combination, including the “null combination” in which the pianist was the only performer. Furthermore, any instrumentalist could play any combination of the score pages for that part in any order.
Last night’s performance involved two flute players, one an SFCM student, two clarinetists, again one an SFCM student, two bassoons, one an SFCM student, one trumpeter, two violinists, one violist, two cellists, one an SFCM student, and one bassist. They were distributed around the Concert Hall stage to surround the pianist (Kate Campbell) in the center of it all. Hunter performed his own choreography in the spaces separating the different players. Artistic Director Eric Dudley served as conductor; but this just involved using his arms to represent the second hand of a clock, allowing all performers to observe the progress of the performance minute-by-minute.
Merce Cunningham preparing to serve as timekeeper for John Cage (photograph by Jack Mitchell, courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company)
My guess is that Cage preferred the noun “concert” to “concerto” because he did not want the audience to have preconceptions about genre. This was definitely a “concert” involving performers playing their parts before an audience; but it definitely was not an instance of concerto-like interplay between a soloist and an ensemble. To the contrary, however many players are involved, each has a solo part to play; and only the piano is required to participate. Participation, in turn, is a matter of providing instances of sound to fill an interval of 25 minutes as it elapses.
One might almost say that Cage had prepared a situation in which the act of listening involved as much commitment as the act of performing. One can appreciate the distribution of the performers across the stage, because, as one adjusts to the experience, awareness of the location of a sound becomes as important as the sound itself. Furthermore, the listener is free to attend to any particular area of the stage to appreciate the spatial extent of the sources of those sounds.
This raised a major challenge for choreographer Hunter. Even without his presence, the attentive listener quickly comes to appreciate how Cage’s “Concert” amounts to an engaging exploration of relations between space and time. Thus, in my efforts to be an attentive listener, I found Hunter’s choreography to distract from spatial awareness of all the participating musicians. On the other hand SFCMP had made it a point to encourage the hearing-impaired to attend this performance; so it would be churlish of me to suggest that my approach to this particular Cage composition was an “authoritative” one.
The remainder of the program tended to take similar approaches to the complementary sensations of hearing and seeing. In the case of Anna Clyne’s “Steelworks,” this involved the projection of a video with its own soundtrack behind the trio of performers, Tod Brody (flute and piccolo), Jeff Anderle (bass clarinet) and Haruka Fujii (percussion). In this case the visual element was not a distraction, but the relationship between the music and the movie was more than a little muddled. (There was also a technical problem with the projection, which required stopping the performance and then continuing after the video difficulties had been resolved.)
Ironically, the only other Clyne composition I know, “Night Ferry,” which was composed for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was rich in images, all of which were evoked by her skilled handling of a wide diversity of instrumental resources. “Steelworks” ran the risk of the audience putting more time into making sense of the projected material and disregarding the three performers. Given the rich diversity of sonorities provided by those performers, that would have amounted to missing the point of having composed the music in the first place!
The first half of the program involved music inspired by images. Cellist Hanna Addario-Berry began the evening playing a movement from the Sonaquifer Suite, which had been composed for her on commission by Gloria Justen. The title of the movement was “Flowing-Turning Dance;” and one could easily imagine the transition from the perpetuum mobile unfolding of the music to a choreographic interpretation of that music.
Similarly, David Coll’s “Caldera” involving imagining the potential of a volcano erupting turning into the physical eruption itself. This performance again involved both Anderle and Fujii, the latter playing marimba for most of the composition. One seldom encounters music in which the energy is potential, rather than kinetic. Coll’s score was clearly a challenging one, but Anderle and Fujii gave a vigorous account of how they rose to those challenges.
The remaining work on the program was Henry Cowell’s third string quartet. Cowell called this the “Mosaic Quartet,” because it involves movable parts, somewhat like square tiles being moved around to create a mosaic image. The piece was given an informed account by the string quartet of violinists Roy Malan and Susan Freier, violist Meena Bhasin, and cellist Stephen Harrison. This was a situation in which one could only appreciate the idea after hearing several different approaches to performance. The selection made by the performers last night allowed one to appreciate Cowell’s approach to the thematic material, but the idea behind the music itself never surfaced in any convincing way that would engage attentive listening.
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