Once again a friend was kind enough to transport me to the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland for the annual celebration of the summer solstice with the Garden of Memory concert. As was the case last year, this was a matter of navigating a very large space to check out different performances taking place in different areas. This year I had the presence of mind to print out the map of entire Chapel space indicating which performances would take place at which venues. It turned out that, for the most part, I revisited the performers I had encountered last year with one notable addition.
This year the most memorable performance I experienced came from my return to the space where Paul Dresher and Joel Davel were playing. As was the case last year, Davel played his Marimba Lumina; and Dresher played his Hurdy Grande. This is a massive instrument with a rotating wheel that strokes a single string, and the sound is probably sustained through electronics.
In all likelihood the performance was improvised. However, there was an almost fierce quality to the energy with which Dresher approached his instrument. The result was a wide diversity of thematic episodes (at least one of which seemed to be a waltz) with Dresher steering the melodic line while Davel provided continuo, sometimes departing from his Marimba Lumina controller to join Dresher at the Marimba Lumina. (The two played the instrument face-to-face.) A few of the audience members took this as an occasion to respond to improvised music with improvised dance; but the intricate interleaving of thematic passages kept me fixed in my seat, allowing mind to harvest as much as it could from what ear was providing.
In addition to bringing my map, I also brought my press release, which, for the most part, accounted for the music that Sarah Cahill played in her solo recital. She began with “Kotekan,” one of the movements from Vivian Fung’s suite Glimpses. The composer was present for the occasion and made a few introductory remarks. The movement title refers to a genre of Balinese gamelan music, a genre that has been familiar to me for many decades, reinforced by a trip to Bali that my wife and I made while we were living in Singapore. Listening to that movement left me wondering what Fung’s other “glimpses” were.
Cahill followed “Kotekan” with a solo piano composition by Kaija Saariaho, serving as a memorial for the composer’s death at the beginning of this month. Cahill’s performance of “Ballade” marked my first encounter with any of Saariaho’s piano music. She composed this short piece in 2005 for Emanuel Ax, but I never heard him play it on any of his visits to San Francisco. Cahill then concluded her set with music that had been composed for memorial purposes. Alvin Curran’s “for Cornelius” was composed in 1982 after Cornelius Cardew died by being hit by a car while crossing the street. Cardew was responsible for many adventurous (sometimes mind-boggling) approaches to composition; and he is the namesake for the Cornelius Cardew Choir, which gave an outdoor performance yesterday.
I also checked out the room in which percussionist Andy Meyerson was playing, again with Guillermo Galindo but without his Living Earth Show colleague Travis Andrews. The performances involved costumes and a decidedly bizarre mask. Once again Galindo was in charge of the electronics. As I recall, at least one wind instrument was involved and Meyerson’s work had less to do with “standard” percussion and more with seeking out sources for percussive sounds.
Finally, I had a brief encounter with guitarist Giacomo Fiore. I am pretty sure that his instrument had been both made and tuned for just intonation. He was playing with electronic enhancements that seemed to have provided for further explorations in the the harmonic series of natural overtones. I probably should have spent more time following his work, but I had to find my way back to the Chimes Chapel in time for Cahill’s performance. So it goes when one has to deal with such a feast of listening opportunities.
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