New Music for the End Time

The Collaborative Composition Initiative concluded its week in St. Louis with two sets of premieres: nine new pieces performed by the Unheard-of Ensemble at Dissonant Works on South Jefferson Friday night and nine miniatures inspired by works at the Kemper Art Museum performed by members of the ensemble at the museum on the campus of Washington University Saturday afternoon.

The Brooklyn-based Unheard-of Ensemble takes its configuration (clarinet, violin, cello, piano) from the ensemble for which Oliver Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time (1941). Messiaen was limited by the instruments played by the musicians who happened to be starving alongside him in a Nazi prisoner-of-war. By adopting this unusual and accidental instrumental configuration and running a collaborative project that compels new work for it, the Unheard-of Ensemble perpetuates into the future what was supposed to be the sounds of the end time.

The Dissonant Works show of Composer Premieres opened Friday night with Emelia Ulrich’s a brief and gentle reminder of what if means to be alive, a suitable title for a new work that flies in the face of the end of time. Ulrich developed short phrases played in unison by everyone except the pianist—Ford Fourqurean (clarinet), Matheus Souza (violin), and Iva Casian-Lakoš (cello)—later joined by a piano run by Daniel Anastasio followed with clarinet cascades.

Preston Posey’s Lightness and Weight jumped in with a tuneful and rhythmic ensemble composition, which can be surprising in the anything-goes terrain of new music. The person working the door, who turned out to be a fellow composer, danced in place, looking like a person dancing to good music rather than some tortured interpretive dance quintet a la the Dude’s landlord in The Big Lebowski. Claude Bolling fans would dig this piece.

In Scintillement, Yeeun Sim wrote a vocable singing part for the cellist, a nice touch. The cello parts themselves tilted toward grunge. All the players had a virtuoso opportunity, especially the spidery piano. The skronky clarinet was more in keeping with my new-music expectations. Scintillement struck me as a mature piece that was fun to play.

Yeonsuk Jung—the door person who danced to Preston Posey—delivered a lush, cinematic morsel in When the Stars Linger on the Sea. A repeating piano figure and conventional bowing techniques for the stringed instruments were easy on the ear. The clarinet part was pitched pleasingly low like a woodwind tuba. Consonance, as well as dissonance, works.

Haibei Chen’s Fantasy took advantage of a tightly knit ensemble in creating vivid interactions between the various instruments. She wrote rhythmic ensemble episodes, melodic clarinet departures, complex piano clusters with an outside jazz edge. More could be done in developing this energetic piece.

Jason Zhang said he wrote Reliquaries d’oiseaux about the disappearance of bird species, which harkened back to the end-time origin of the ensemble’s instrumentation. He seized the opportunity to write bird songs for those instruments which the musicians performed with uncanny skill. Other passages could have passed for really good foley—atmospheric sound for film. Sounds came alive.

Max Eidinoff’s introduction of his piece Converging on a Critical Band did not match what I heard, and I suspected his composition was relying on something the technology did not deliver in this performance. He said the sounds of the keyboard would be multiplied by the sounds of the rest of the ensemble, but I never heard the “wild, chaotic sound” that was supposed to ensue. Dissonance did not work.

In Travertine & Marble, Alex Brown wrote about consonance and dissonance, pleasing surface versus turbulent depths. He came down on the side of tune and rhythm, coherent narrative over discordant interlude. The formidable resources of the band were not fully explored, however. He skimmed too close to the surfaces.

Composer Premieres closed with Scorched Earth by Dayton Hare, a piece inspired by enduring brutal heat domes in the Northeast seasoned with wildfire smoke from Canada. Maybe it made sense to end the show on an end-of-time note. Hare wrote all-ensemble vamps that evoked (and one seldom has the chance to say this) Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. The clarinet screamed like the siren on a fire truck on its way to a fire that it will not be able to subdue.

That piece must have cut close to the heart of Christopher Stark, one of the composers who helped the Unheard-of Ensemble develop these new pieces. Stark has released a recording of the ensemble performing his Fire Ecologies, the Montana-born composer’s meditation on the proliferation of Western wild fires. Their friendship and the musical resources of the region, including Stark’s academic home of Washington University, explain why this summer collaboration happened in St. Louis.

At the very final performance of the collaboration on Saturday afternoon, we would even hear a movement from Fire Ecologies performed live by the band on a burning hot August afternoon in St. Louis. More on that fire next time.

The post New Music for the End Time appeared first on Common Reader.