One Found Sound at The Midway: Videos

The OFS sextet playing “Por Seis” in front of mural artwork by Shrine (from the YouTube video of the performance being discussed)

About a month ago the musicians of One Found Sound (OFS) teamed up with Max Savage, Video Producer for the Noisy Savage video production house, and audio engineer Scott Padden (also an OFS founder and bassist) to capture live performances of recent compositions played at The Midway in Dogpatch. The result was a YouTube playlist for a “virtual watch party” entitled LYRIC. The playlist presented two compositions, Valerie Coleman’s wind quintet entitled “Umoja” (which is the first day of Kwanzaa) and the three-movement “Por Seis,” a sextet (as its Spanish title implies) by Quinn Mason scored for three winds (flute, clarinet doubling on bass clarinet, and cor anglais) and three strings (violin, cello, and guitar, with guitar serving as continuo). The wind quintet players were Sasha Launer on flute, Jesse Barrett on oboe, Sarah Bonomo on clarinet, Audra Loveland on horn, and Jamael Smith on bassoon. In “Por Seis” Launer, Barrett, and Bonomo were joined by violinist Rachel Patrick, cellist Saul Richmond-Rakerd, and guitarist Justin Houchin. This latter composition was being given its world premiere performance.

Both of these compositions had a decidedly upbeat rhetoric, providing just the right distractions from current pandemic conditions. Those of my generation may have appreciated a parallel between Mason’s “Por Seis” and Morton Gould’s “Latin-American Symphonette.” (I had my own experience of Sehnsucht when I realized how long it had been since I had last heard the Gould piece.) However, Gould composed for a full orchestra, rather than intimate exchanges among six musicians. As a result “Por Seis” had a more “sociable” feeling to its execution, as thematic fragments passed from one instrument to another against an ostinato progression provided primarily by the guitar (until the guitarist had his own solo takes).

Coleman’s composition had similar “folk” qualities, again with a repeated pattern subjected to variations taken by each of the quintet players in turn. Savage’s video work was particularly effective in guiding the viewer from one instrument to another. Also, Loveland executed a delightfully witty glissando to establish the coda, almost as if it was the duty of the horn to tell the audience, “That’s all folks!”

Indeed, all four of the individual movements divided among these two compositions were given engagingly playful execution by the OFS players. This was definitely a case in which brevity was the soul of wit. However, the progressions from one movement to the next also provided an overall framework for the two distinctively different compositions, making for a “concert experience in miniature” that can easily be relished to raise the spirits.