This morning the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen launched the third SoundBox concert in the current season of performances streamed through the SFSymphony+ on-demand service. The title of the program is Patterns. While the preview article I wrote for this program frequently cited minimalist techniques, Salonen never once referred to “minimalism” (unless I am mistaken) or, for that matter, Philip Glass’ preferred phrase, “repetitive structures.” Instead, the program explored how four different composers (one of whom happened to be Salonen himself) chose to work with patterns as the building blocks of a composition.
This was most evident in the “grand finale” of the program, Terry Riley’s “In C.” This is based on a score that simply enumerates 53 short phrases, ordered by assigning each a number from 1 to 53. The shortest of these phrases consists of a single note (which is, of course, C). One of them is significantly longer than the other 52. The piece is scored for any number of performers playing any variety of instruments. The only “leadership” of the performance involves one musician playing “The Pulse,” the note C hammered out consistently in repeated eighth notes. This tends to be played on the high register of a piano; but Salonen himself provided “The Pulse” by playing it on a toy piano.
The 53 phrases, in turn, were played by 27 SFS musicians. Their instruments were violins, violas, cellos, flute, piccolo, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, bassoons, contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombones, tuba, percussion, and ukulele. The “ground rules” are that each performer must play all 53 phrases in numerical order. However, each phrase may be repeated as many times as the performer wishes; and each performer can pause for as long as (s)he wishes before advancing to the next phrase.
This performance was captured on video by Frank Zamacona, working with multiple cameras. By way of “subtitles,” he superimposed the individual notated fragments at the bottom of the screen. Obviously, he could not account for all the fragments being played at any given time; but, for those who could read music notation, those projected fragments allowed the attentive ear to home in on which instruments were playing a particular fragment at a particular moment in time.
If that were not enough by way of visual stimuli, Zamacona then surrounded the musicians with animated projections designed by Adam Larsen, most of which seemed to involve silhouettes of people walking forwards or backwards with occasional intrusions of both domestic and wild animals. In other words he embellished a musical structure based on repetitions of a catalog of musical phrases with projections of repetitions of familiar shapes in motion. Thus, not only were there “patterns” in Riley’s 53 repeated phrases; there were also patterns in Larsen’s repeated shapes. As a result, the entire video amounted to a grand design of patterns reflecting patterns.
Reflection figured just as significantly in the selection that preceded “In C,” Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” (mirror in the mirror). This music was far more austere in its resources, since the piece was composed for violin (Chen Zhao) and piano (Elizabeth Dorman). However, the performance was augmented by complementing the two musicians with two members of the Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Adji Cissoko and Shuaib Elhassan, performing choreography by King. In this case the music had less to do with patterning and more do to with exploring different ways to permute and combine a limited number of pitches. However, for this performance, the projected video again drew on approaches to reflection, often suggesting that the dancers was taking place in a space defined by a highly elaborate multi-mirror kaleidoscope:
screen shot from the video being discussed
The program began with “Clapping Music,” composed by Steve Reich, one of Riley’s colleagues at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, who was one of the participants in the first performance of “In C.” Indeed, Riley got the idea of composing around a rhythmic pulse from Reich! However, “Clapping Music” is all rhythm without any role for pitch. As the title suggests, rhythmic patterns are defined simply by clapping hands; and Reich composed the piece for only two performers. However, Salonen presented the piece as “chamber music” on a slightly larger scale in which he performed along with Steven Dibner, Bryce Leafman, Stan Muncy, Catherine Payne, Nick Platoff, and Jessica Valeri. This “clapping ensemble” performed with such precision that one could still appreciate the interplay of rhythms across the two notated parts; but the increase in the number of performers added to the impact of the rhythmic patterns from which the score was composed.
Salonen also used this concert as an opportunity to premiere his own music. “Saltat sobrius” (dancing sober) was composed as a fantasy on one of the earliest documented compositions of polyphony, the four-part organum “Sederunt principes” (the princes sat), composed by Pérotin to be sung in Notre-Dame de Paris. Prior to the emergence of polyphony, sung texts were chanted in unison in rhythms that tended to reflect the rhythms of speech. Pérotin’s predecessor at Notre-Dame, Léonin, is often seen as the “father of polyphony,” although his earliest efforts tended to involve one voice singing elaborate patterns while another sang sustained pitches of a familiar chant. Pérotin extended Léonin’s technique by providing additional voices singing against the intoned chant pitches. These eventually involved elaborate rhythmic patterns, which marked the beginning of music notation as we now know it. “Sederunt principes” is important in music history because it involves three independent melodic lines sung above the cantus firmus, the tones of the chant which is being accompanied.
Those familiar with the music of Notre-Dame from this early period of music history would have no trouble recognizing the phrases of “Sederunt principes.” Salonen basically dispenses with the cantus firmus and focuses on the patterns that unfold in the upper three voices. He then subjects those patters to different processes of recombination through which new patterns emerge. This is realized by an imaginative “three-by-three” approach to instrumentation. The instruments involved are viola, cellos, and bass, each of which has three parts for three individual performers. There is then a “continuo” of sorts provided by a harp. As a result, the perception of how those new patterns evolve out of older ones is enhanced through the composer’s approach to instrumentation. As in the performance of “In C,” this is very much music of patterns reflecting patterns; and those reflections are clearly evident in the transparency of Salonen’s score.
The duration of this Patterns concert was slightly less than 50 minutes, but the overall content was so rich that one could hardly wish that there had been any more of it.
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