SFP and SFCM Memorialize Ingram Marshall

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented a special tribute concert to memorialize composer Ingram Marshall, who died at the age of 80 a little less than a year ago on May 31, 2022. The program featured four soloists, pianists Sarah Cahill and Timo Andres (one of Marshall’s students), oboist Libby Van Cleve, and guitarist Benjamin Verdery. The program also included students of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), where Marshall had held a visiting teaching position, in ensemble performances of a brass sextet and a chamber orchestra. These groups were conducted by Edwin Outwater and John Adams (a former SFCM faculty member), respectively.

Thanks to Foster Reed’s New Albion Records, it is almost certain that the most familiar work on the program was Marshall’s “Fog Tropes.” This stands as an excellent example of how Marshall could interleave instrumental performance with prerecorded audio content. The instruments for “Fog Tropes” are pairs of trumpets, trombones, and horns, which perform in an acoustic setting of recordings of fog horns in the San Francisco Bay area. While the album makes for a thoroughly engaging listening experience, last night’s performance revealed no end of techniques to interleave the instrumental performances with the recorded content. (The distinction of those two resources is almost impossible to grasp when listening to the New Albion album.)

That interplay of performance and recording also provided the foundation for the three solo compositions. The program began with Verdery and Cahill, and the intermission was followed by Van Cleve. Each composition involved a “context” of previously-composed music. In Verdery’s “Soe-pa,” that context was the B-flat major prelude in BWV 866, the prelude and fugue in that key from the first Book of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. The piano context was “In My End Is My Beginning,” a title describing one of the earliest polyphonic compositions. Finally, the English horn setting involved an old (1929) 78 RPM recording of Leopold Stokowski conducting Jean Sibelius’ “The Swan of Tuonela,” an explicit reflection on death.

The program concluded with the one solely instrumental offering. Adams led the SFCM Chamber Orchestra and Andres in a performance of “Flow,” which had been composed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Here, too, one encounters, as Marshall’s program note puts it, “touches of Ivesean tunes or quotes that are rather hidden but nevertheless inform the structure and the ‘sound’ of this music.” However, because this is a thickly-textured score, those “touches” are far less audible than those arising in the solo-instrument compositions. Ultimately, “Flow” comes across as a wild ride in which the experience of motion itself is more relevant than any sense of where that flow may be going.

Taken as a whole, the evening offered an engaging survey of Marshall’s approaches to composition; and it is worth considering that the program provides an excellent plan for a new recording of Marshall’s work.