World Premiere of Danny Clay’s Latest

from the Bandcamp Web page for the music being discussed

Yesterday evening saw the world premiere of the latest work by composer Danny Clay, a project that began as a partnership with The Living Earth Show (TLES), the duo of percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews. The project began around the time of the first reports of COVID-19 but two days before the “Shelter in Place” order was officially imposed by the San Francisco Health Officer on March 13. It was based on what Meyerson called “a fundamental research question: ‘is it possible for us to use the tools of our discipline—classical art music—to make people feel better?’”

The result was a composition in eight parts entitled Music for Hard Times, which Meyerson has described as “a sonic resource for comfort and calming.” Indeed, the score itself is described as “a series of composed ‘calming exercises’ used to create every sound in the piece.” Each of those exercises is called a “strategy,” amounting to instructions that the performers must then interpret according to their own logic. Music notation appears in only some of the strategies, never in a form that can simply be “played.”

As TLES developed their own strategies in response to the “call” of Clay’s strategies, they prepared recordings of each of the eight parts. These have now been compiled in their Music for Hard Times album, which was released on Bandcamp yesterday. The album is available for both streaming and digital download, and the download includes the PDF of the score describing the eight “calming exercises.”

However, as the television hucksters like to say, “That’s not all!” Jon Fischer created an ambient film that provides a “visual context” for the TLES recordings of each of the eight parts of the score. That video was presented as part of yesterday’s world premiere performance, “projected” on the Living Music with Nadia Sirota Facebook site. The overall duration of that performance was a little over 40 minutes.

I suspect that many of my generation would have free-associated this synthesis of images and music with Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi, whose soundtrack consisted entirely of music composed by Philip Glass. The subtitle for Koyaanisqatsi was Life Out of Balance, and it is clear from the Hard Times project that the “sonic resource” had been conceived to compensate for the loss of balance in the wake of the onset of COVID-19. However, that is about as far as any attempt at comparison can go.

Reggio’s images were anything but calming, running the gamut from disturbingly suggestive to downright spooky. Glass’ repetitive structures almost served as an infernal rotating grindstone through which Reggio honed sharper and sharper connotations. The result was one of the most intense couplings of the visual and the auditory, but there was absolutely nothing calming about the viewing experience.

In contrast most of Fischer’s images tended to evoke the quietude of the natural world or the panoramic landscape. His images served as the perfect match to the quietude of the TLES interpretation of Clay’s score. Indeed, the few images of any human presence provide the only moments that a viewer might find slightly disturbing, suggesting, perhaps, that the natural world is taking care of itself without regard to impact on the human race.

The overall structure of the film paralleled the eight parts of Clay’s composition with “title cards” marking the beginning of each successive part. However, at the premiere there was no explicit suggestion of how many parts there were (unless one had visited the Bandcamp Web page). What is important is that, in the absence of any such preparatory background knowledge, none of the parts ever overstayed its welcome, either through the TLES realization of the score or through the sequences of evocative images that Fischer provided. As was the case for Koyaanisqatsi, I suspect that this will be a cinematic experience that I shall enjoy repeating many times.