This Year’s Emerging Composer Concert

The ARTZenter poster of the latest Emerging Composer Grant winners

As was announced a week ago, the ARTZenter Institute joined forces with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), led by Artistic Director & Conductor Eric Dudley for another concert of world premiere performances made possible by the Emerging Composer Grant Program. I can now present the order of works on the program as it was performed last night:

1. Euna Joh: A Grief Observed
2. Jackson A. Waters: my rage is quiet
3. Luca Pasquini: Memories of Storm & Light
4. Eric Estrada Valadez: Divided Realities

As in the past, the composer’s were all present, providing brief but informative introductions for each of the pieces. The size of the ensemble was generous enough to fill the stage, but there were enough imaginative approaches to instrumentation to make for an engaging evening.

Joh’s composition struck me as a study in the diverse aspects of mathematical noise. For those unfamiliar with the term, it involves a sequence of random numbers; and there is a whole sub-discipline in mathematics involving what makes a series of integers really random. Mind you, I have no idea how much mathematics influenced Joh; but “A Grief Observed” came across as an étude conceived to defy the usual predictability one associates with a musical composition. The duration was just long enough for the attentive listener to appreciate that challenge of predictability. Waters’ “my rage is quiet” was also a “noise étude.” He described his approach as “bottled tension,” and his program note suggested that this was a reflection on his own personal dispositions.

The title “Memories of Storm & Light” came across as a description of instrumentation. The “storm” emerged from a fair amount of the score being devoted to the bass drum. The “light,” presumably before the storm, began the performance with an extended violin solo. The result was an engaging study in contrasts that never came across as too academic. “Divided Realities” was also a title that spoke for itself. A wide diversity of sonorities emerged from all the different locations in the ensemble, and the superposition of those sonorities came across as an intense conflict. This performance left me leaving Herbst Theatre with a sigh of relief but also with a sense of a journey well taken.