One Found Sound Launches Eleventh Season

Last night at Heron Arts, One Found Sound presented Velocity, the first program in its eleventh season. The program featured works by two contemporary composers, both women: Hannah Kendall and Angélica Negrón. The second half of the program was then devoted entirely to Franz Schubert’s D. 803 octet in F major, scored for string quartet, bass, clarinet, bassoon, and horn.

D. 803 was composed at a time when Schubert was exploring longer durations. The work consists of six movements, and its duration tends to be about one hour. Some of the forms reflect on past practices, such as a set of variations on a theme or a ternary form menuetto. Schubert was apparently inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 20 septet in E-flat major, which was scored for string trio, bass, clarinet, bassoon, and horn and is shorter than D. 803 by about twenty minutes. This work also consisted of six movements, but Schubert’s overall structure was a decidedly unique approach to divertissement.

The program began with Kendall’s “Vera,” which she composed in 2008. This was scored for violin, viola, cello, and clarinet. Kendall was apparently interested in Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique when she began to work on this composition. Nevertheless, the voice behind the music was decidedly her own, rather than Schoenberg’s; and she cultivated a unique rhetoric that engagingly explored alternatives to the usual dominant-tonic chord progressions.

Negrón’s “bubblegum grass/peppermint field,” composed in 2011, seemed to be structured around Balinese idioms. However, the music was scored for string quartet supplemented by electronics based on capturing, transforming, and playing brief samples taken from the four musicians. The result was a unique rhetoric of sonorities that definitely deserved more than a single listening experience.

Both of these new works would have benefitted from program notes. Unfortunately, that content seems to have been provided only for cell phones; and scrolling through a small window tends to be a major distraction from the listening experience! Before starting to write this article, I tried to find that content on the One Found Sound Web site, sadly with no success at all. I would be only too happy to revisit both of those compositions by Kendall and Negrón, but first I would like to prepare myself with some useful content for reading! For that matter, it would have been nice to know the names of all the performers who did such a splendid job in contributing to all three of last night’s offerings!