This afternoon the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) launched its latest video performance. This one was the in the COMMUNITY event for the current season, and the program was entitled Sound Encounters. The title referred to how each of the four works on the program involved its own unique approach to dealing with the potentially wide diversity of sonorities afforded by both musical instruments and electronic gear. This video will be available for viewing through June 23, but it requires a ticket for admission. SFCMP has a ticketing Web page, and there is no charge for the ticket.
Both of the instrumental selections involved the percussion family, and these were solo performances by Andy Meyerson. The program concluded with a composition that Amadeus Regucera had composed for Meyerson, who gave the premiere performance, playing only a bass drum, as part of a solo recital at Z Below in September of 2019. Having written about that recital on this site, that composition, entitled “IMY/ILY” (I miss you/I love you), afforded the one luxury of encountering recently written music for a second time. At that first Meyerson performance, “IMY/ILY” left the deepest impression of the entire program; and that impression was just as strong during this “return visit.”
Indeed, after having been seated in the audience not too far from the performer, it would be fair to say that the premiere made for one of the scariest encounters I had experienced with a new piece of music. The composition was as much theater as it was music, involving what I had previously called a confrontational stance between the percussionist and a single instrument. I further observed that the confrontation was “uncompromisingly brutal;” and, towards the end of the performance, Meyerson appeared to have assumed the role of a self-flagellating penitent. The video made for SFCMP captured this intensity, but it would be fair to say that it fell short of the gut-wrenching experience of being in the presence of the performance itself.
At the other end of the program, Meyerson began with James Tenney’s “having never written a note for percussion,” scored for solo tam-tam (the gong from the Chinese family of percussion instruments). The performance consisted simply of an extended roll on the instrument, beginning at a barely audible level, gradually ascending to an intense fortissimo, and then receding back to the barely audible. In other words Tenney had justified his title with a composition consisting of a single note!
Of course, that one note was far from a single sonority. At each dynamic level, the gong responded with the spectral qualities of different collections of overtones. As a result, the attentive listener could appreciate how changes in dynamics evoked noticeable changes in the sound of the instrument itself. Thus, to dismiss this as a one-note composition would be to miss the point. Rather, Meyerson’s performance led the attentive listener on a feature-rich journey of the many different acoustic affordances elicited from this one instrument.
Meyerson’s two performances framed two compositions by sound artists from the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California at Berkeley. The first of these was “it is always today,” composed with Maija Hynninen and including video by Olivia Ting. The video amounted to an ongoing panorama of abstract and concrete landscapes, complemented by audio that included stereophonic synthesized sounds mixed with texts in Finnish and French.
The ten-minute duration provided sufficient time for the attentive listener/viewer to “get the point” and appreciate the efforts of the two creators, which is more than can be said of the second offering, “QuFoam” by Jon Kulpa. This piece involved a coordination between electronics and visuals that was so rigid that it did not take long for the viewer to “get the point.” Unfortunately, once that “point” was established, the performance continued for an overly generous amount of time without adding much embellishment to the underlying idea behind the creation. Thus, while Tenney, Hynninen, and Regucera all brought to the listener a clear sense of beginning, middle, and end, “QuFoam” rambled on with little sense of structure to orient that listener.
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