Struck, plucked, scraped shakes things up at Yerba Buena
“Struck, plucked, scraped & shaken” broke new ground in the fertile area of contemporary percussion music. Last Tuesday the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts hosted the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players for a twenty-first century program performed by five percussionists, harp, bass, and voice. Two of the composers were in attendance, and joined mezzo soprano Mary Nessinger for a discussion prior to the concert.
There have been several extraordinary percussion-featured concerts recently, among them Oakland Symphony’s Water Concerto by Tan Dun and Cabrillo Music Festival’s Raise the Roof by Michael Daugherty, as well as distinguished works too numerous to mention. In the last twenty years a number of Bay Area percussionists have become legendary for their command of the difficult modern work, and composers are investing more of their talents in composing for them. Tuesday’s concert counts several of those luminaries among their ranks.
Yiorgos Vassilandonakis, after a Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley’s music department, counted John Thow and Jorge Liderman among his teachers, two composers who are sorely missed after their passing last year. Their lyrical approach to progressive material, coupled with an emphasis on principle over motives, is detectable in Yiorgos’ Cochleas, a percussion solo performed by Christopher Froh.
Asked beforehand how he approached vocal writing, he replied, “…sound, phonemes, meaning—it is different from composing instrumental…When setting for voice, I am very careful about consonants, because consonants are percussion.” Reversing this thought, one can presume that text underlies the slacker thud of bass and taut hiss of snare. Named for the spiral shell or ear canal, Cochleas opens with a soft “dink” of muted metal and spirals out of control.
Yiorgos describes the piece as “…the ways in which a sonic particle can exponentially grow within a given space to the point of consuming it…” and this evolution underlies, but never usurps, the cyclical beauty of the piece. Slow reverb of xylophone set the tempo, a beat of near tuning that is inherent in large metal tubes and temple bells. Froh circled through metallic timbres, returning to the sugared ice of sleigh bells, and each time removing more cloth covers which muted the surfaces. He finished with a jaw-dropping turn of speed, arms flinging in all directions while keeping the dynamic
s intimate, a soft poetry that did indeed consume itself, and his audience along with it.
Moving from “struck” to “plucked,” Karen Gottlieb performed Maki Ishii’s harp solo, Image in the Forest. Mating Debussy textures with eastern scales, Gottlieb propelled the work with passages that held the phrasing of nature. Zen silences and the sudden slap of strings succumbed to lower register scumbling, directing us towards the inner rhymes and rhythms of a forest. An occasional Ravel chord brought the discrete strands together, a reminder of nature’s curious sense of harmony.
Electronics entered the program with Franck Bedrossian’s Digital for percussion, amplified contrabass, and electronic samplings. Richard Worn’s manic bowing under the bridge (sul ponticelo) cut through Daniel Kennedy’s bowed cymbals against a subtle soundtrack coordinated by click-tracks. The bass bowing shifted to unrelenting harmonics, as the electronics moved from very interior sounds to slide of metal on metal and crescendo into the squealing of brakes.
A standard drum set augmented with larger-than-usual bass drum kept an unlikely combination of low percussion and high bass, with an electronic backdrop that ranged from jet engine roar to a wind chime of broken crystals and the subtle breathing of a subway tunnel at night.
Bedrossian’s talented use of instrumental language creates its own grammar, a map towards an undiscovered continent.
Ishii’s Fourteen Percussions brought back Kennedy and collaborator Loren Mach for a percussion duet that was equally dance and mortal combat.
Then Kennedy and Froh were joined by percussionists Benjamin Paysen and William Winant as a backdrop to mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger, in György Ligeti’s Sippal, dobbal, nádihegedüval, a lovely group of experimental poems by Sándor Weöres sung in Hungarian.
Nessinger showed off a vocal dexterity and range which Ligeti requires, crunching the Hungarian “gy” word endings, and moving from light and dreamlike in Alma álma to nasal and abrupt in Szakó (Parakeet). Particularly effective was her octave leaping, both fluid and meditative, in Kínai Templom (Chinese Temple), set to tubular bells. That text is just a list of words, profound and random.
Ligeti’s musical approach pairs his description of the poet, “…profound and playful, elitist and vulgar, he was Hungary’s Mozart.” Ligeti, who died in 2006, could have been describing himself.
The SF Contemporary Music Players’s next concert, “American Mosaic,” includes the music of Elliot Carter, Davidovsky, and others Nov. 3 at Herbst Theater. And Nov 2 is a pre-performance demonstration and lecture, helping to make their adventurous choices more accessible. Information is available on their website, www.sfcmp.org.
—Adam Broner
Originally published in the Piedmont Post