Symbolism for All Ages

Last year Danny Clay held the 2019 McKnight Visiting Composer Residence in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. He spend his time working with two different vocal ensembles. MPLS (imPulse) has a mission to build “choral communities by performing living music, embracing the singer experience, and fostering novel collaborations.” It should not take too much cerebration to deduce that this group, a semi-professional project-based chamber chorus, is based in Minneapolis. ComMUSICation (CMC), on the other hand, was created to bring skills of music-making to all youth, regardless of background. It is a member of El Sistema USA, a United States program based on the El Sistema movement initiated in Venezuela by Jose Antonio Abreu. CMC is based in St. Paul’s Frogtown.

Clay decided to create a composition, entitled Sounds in Motion, which consisted of a collection of a cappella compositions each created by the members of one group to be sung by the other group. Furthermore, none of the participants would work with conventional music notation. Rather, each composition would be written using graphic primitives, such as squiggles, wiggles, blobs, and doodles. When a composition was presented, the composer would demonstrate how the elements of his/her graphic primitives should be interpreted in sound. The performance of each song was then accompanied by an animation that would trace its progress through the score being interpreted.

One of the most interesting observations of the resulting performance was that it was a great equalizer. Clay created a “title page” for each song, accompanying the title by identifying which group composed the piece. However, if one did not pay attention to who was doing the singing, almost always it was difficult to distinguish the groups. Mind you, every now and then one would unmistakably detect more refined vocal work and assume that the performance was by MPLS; but most of the symbolic primitives did not allow for such refinement!

Danny Clay (top row second from left) introduces his performers prior to presenting his Sounds in Motion composition (screen shot from the YouTube video of the performance)

The entire composition, being given its world premiere, was relatively brief, lasting roughly one quarter of an hour. The video of the performance, which was uploaded to YouTube by ComMUSICation, included an introduction by Clay of about ten minutes duration. Clay provided a straightforward account of what listeners (and score followers) could expect. As a result, most viewers were well prepared for both the what and the how of the performance that followed.

The result was an engaging and inspiring venture of exploration into processes of making music unencumbered by many of the stale academic precepts of what music is supposed to be.