Composer Frederic Rzewski (photograph by Christian Mondrup, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
Last night at the Old First Presbyterian Church, pianist Sarah Cahill presented the first Old First Concerts (O1C) program for the New Year. Four of the five works on her program were receiving premiere performances, while the final offering could be taken as a reflection on earlier times in the Bay Area. The composer of the first work on the program, Frederic Rzewski, died before he had the opportunity to listen to that work’s premiere performance.
Rzewski composed “Humanitas” to honor the 85th birthday of Terry Riley, who is now still alive and well at the age of 87. The composition interleaves spoken text with the piano performance. [updated 1/7, 4:25 p.m. The text sources for the first movement were Classical (Plautus, Cicero, and Catullus). The remaining sources were in English with the final selection taken from the conclusion of Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”]
Given the nature of the content, this is music that probably deserves more than a single listening experience. This is a bit disconcerting when one considers the accessibility of earlier Rzewski piano compositions, such as “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” and the four-movement North American Ballads. However, it may just be the case that one only begins to orient oneself to “Humanitas” after more than a single listening encounter.
The most recent work on the program was the third “Book” in Arlene Sierra’s ongoing Birds and Insects project. This installment (which has not yet been completed) currently consists of four relative short pieces. The first three account for the birds (Canyon Wren, Lovely Fairywren, Tawny Owls); and the suite concludes with “Great Grig,” an insect in the Orthoptera order, which encompasses animals such as grasshoppers and crickets.
Cahill’s notes provided an informative quote from the composer: “Each piece features distinct characteristics to fit its title: spelling the name in pitches, employing a transcription of an animal’s song from nature, recalling its physical movement in various ways, or developing ideas drawn from an animal’s cultural symbolism.” Those that enjoy Olivier Messiaen’s appropriation of birdsong in his music may be inclined to accuse Sierra of overthinking her work; and, for what it is worth, I was content to treat Cahill’s performance on its own terms without trying to revive any memories of high school biology.
The first half of the program concluded with the second and fifth movements in Robert Pollock’s “Enneagram.” Here again one had to resort to the program notes: “The Enneagram is a geometric nine-pointed figure which maps out the nine fundamental personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships.” This was yet another listening experience that had to contend with too much theory and not enough practice. Like “Humanitas,” this is probably music that requires multiple encounters before any form of sense-making can be exercised.
Composer Carolyn Yarnell was in the audience for the premiere of her “Nocturne,” which took place immediately after the intermission. Ironically, she had composed the piece in 1982, when she was a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I must confess, however, that, even with the intermission break, I had become so saturated with the more recent compositions presented during the first half that I had trouble orienting myself into a “new” work that had been composed 40 years ago.
However, the Eighties also provided the conclusion of Cahill’s program. This was Peter Garland’s six-movement suite Walk in Beauty. Thanks to New Albion Records, this was the one piece I could approach with memory of past encounters. As Garland himself put it, the music was inspired by “the all-night peyote ceremonies of the Native American Church and the curing ceremonies of the Navajo.” All six of the movements are less than four minutes in duration; and, to some extent, that brevity establishes haiku-like qualities. If the many “first contact” experiences of this program had left me feeling more than a little disoriented, Walk in Beauty concluded the listening experience with a more comforting familiarity.
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