SFCMP Begins Year with Emerging Composers

This year the concert scene seems to be getting off to a slow start. However, Herbst Theatre was the place to be last night when, once again, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), led by Artistic Director & Conductor Eric Dudley, offered the latest concert of world premiere performances made possible by the Emerging Composer Grant Program presented by the ARTZenter Institute. As in the past, the program consisted of recent works each by a different composer. In order of appearance, those composers and their respective offerings were as follows:

1. Anak Baiharn: Forever, Until/Until, Forever
2. Trevor Zavac, Composition No. 0136
3. Brady Wolff, Lichtenberg Figures
4. SiHyun Uhm, Pulse

Also as in the past, the program took a brief intermission between the second and third selections.

I must confess that my past experience with mathematics drew me to Zavac’s composition. The numbers represented stages along the chromatic scale. Thus, if one begins with C natural, the following notes will be C-sharp, E-flat, and F-sharp. The span of the entire interval is known as a tritone, which has often served as the fundamental building block for atonal music. “Composition No. 0136” is thus a playful reflection on the role of the tritone among the pioneers of atonality, perhaps leading the listener to wonder just where the path of atonality, now traversing over a century, led.

Suzanne Dean’s cover design for Julian Barnes’ book, The Sense of an Ending (from its Wikipedia page, fair use)

Fortunately, the program as a whole was definitely not mathematically inclined! The opening selection was particularly impressive in the diversity of sonorities and the presentation of those sonorities through different levels of dynamics. What was lacking, unfortunately, was much thought concerning “the sense of an ending” (to appropriate the title of Julian Barnes’ book). That sense was more evident in “Lichtenberg Figures,” perhaps because Wolff seems to have been influenced by the rhetorical devices explored by Maurice Ravel and Alexander Scriabin. My only serious misgiving came with “Pulse,” which left me feeling that it had overstayed its welcome far too long.

That said, all four of these composers are clearly in their early stages. Each of them used their ARTZenter grant productively; and the SFCMP musicians, led by Dudley, could not have done a better job in presenting the results to the audience. That said, I have not heard much further from the composers that “emerged” this past September, making it clear that the path to recognition is definitely a long one!