Songs of a Homeostatic Homer
I have immense respect for the LA Phil’s Green Umbrella, an ongoing series of performances inaugurated in 1981 that highlight budding artists, composers, ideas, and pieces belonging to the more experimental strains of new music. I have enjoyed only a handful of these mesmerizing performances, but all have solidified an indelible impression of the necessary foresight and bravado such a series requires. The uniqueness of these nights at Disney Hall lies in their casualty; unlike the majority of Disney hall nights frequented by silver foxes with golden pockets, the Green Umbrella shades younger concert-goers from traditional patronage by offering more affordable programs of music that would often times have no other venue. The ability to blend the excitability and cultural relevance of classical music into the social fabric of any major American city has always been an onerous task, a job Esa-Pekka Salonen and the rest of LA’s New Music Group have set new standards for. The Green Umbrella stands for more than a series of programs illuminating the regenerative avant-garde underbelly of new music; it symbolizes a fundamentally new relationship with young ideas and fresh composers, a lasting outlet responsible for an immense growth in support for a slice of music that is often shorted change.
Last Tuesday was no exception. It was Salonen’s final Green Umbrella performance at the podium. Steven Stucky led the pre-concert discussion with the four composers involved in the program with a sweat of sentimentality because after being involved with the series since the mid-80s, it was his final hurrah as well. To honor the magnitude of such an occasion, the program consisted of four world premieres of pieces commissioned by the Los Angeles Public Arts program from four different composers all hovering around the age of 30. Salonen wanted to leave with the simple message he has bellowed through his tenure as Music Director: music should, as much as possible, be about the future, not the past.
The four pieces, though quite divergent in many characteristics, all trail from similar academic developments from the past century. The first, Li Po by Enrico Chapela, was uni-directional, straight forward, and engaging as a first piece. Based on a poem by the same name by Tablada, the piece anchored itself in swells and jabs of acoustic orchestration well played by members of LA Phil. The sweeping subtleties were fragile and elegant; they felt like lace in your ears. But it also incorporated electronics that were integrated into the hollow tones of strings; however, some parts proved to be a little distracting. The melodies were admirable and the overlaying of instrumentation was engaging.
Following was Within Her Arms by Anne Clyne, a deeply sentimental, and elegantly textured fully instrumental work dedicated to the composer’s now-deceased mother. There is no doubt the audience adored this piece and saw its simplicity as its strength. Though I was not initially won-over by its tonal resourcefulness, I truly admire her Orwellian ability to do so much with so little. The piece took one figure, or idea, and transmuted it around a cycle of instruments in a subliminal cycle of ways. It felt overwhelmingly similar to Barber’s Adagio at first glance, but was tinged with a very clear sense of post-tonal mentality.
Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece XI is the eleventh piece in the composer’s series of music centered on the limitations and accentuations of the human voice. It involved a cyclical instrumental theme varied through the horns and woodwinds and elegantly reflected in the strings. What stood out immediately about this piece was the composer’s role as lead vocalist. She held two microphones that she burbled, blasted, and twitched her fabricated, self-proclaimed “meaningless” language into note for note, according to a carefully constructed score. I couldn’t help but think her ability to recycle ideas was more original than her sound. Her vocals were reminiscent of Muhly’s newer works, and her harmonies were reflective of Sigur Ros. Though ambitious and well-deserving of a listen, it made me feel like I was hearing something I had already listened to that day.
Finally, we come to Fang Man’s Deluge written for horns, woodwinds, amplified harp, keyboards, prepared piano, percussion, and strings. Man is actually a current PhD student of Steven Stucky’s at Cornell, which added an air of play to the pre-concert talk. Though the piece reeked of George Crumb, who apparently at one point praised the composer’s work, it did so in an invigorating and refreshing way. If there is one single characteristic that shined throughout all the pieces, it would have to be the post-Stockhausen glissando aesthetic, a borderless interpretation of intervals that only ten years ago sounded like nothing but 50s avant-garde kitsch. Man used it effectively and inventively, and orchestrated the careful transitions between ideas delicately and superbly. The piece married a post-atonal European avant-garde disposition with an American sensibility for the light sides of energy and dark moments of repose. Soft, heartening, mysterious, and jagged, the piece was harder to swallow than others, but with far more nutritive rewards. It was a masterful fingerprint to hear and evidence that she has a lasting career ahead.
Fortunately and symbolically, the program ended with Salonen’s Floof for soprano (Hila Plitmann), contrabass clarinet, keyboards, percussion, and cello. I have been a fan of Salonen’s aesthetic as he carefully began to extend himself beyond the world of European high-modernism and into the West Coast Best Coast aesthetic of playfulness and pop accessibility. More digestible than many of his other sounds, this short, energetic little number allows the soprano soloist to shine in a darkly translucent, microscopically reduced play of sci-fi mumbo jumbo. Salonen let his lighter side also stand out in this piece by basing it on slivers of text from Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, a comical and strange collection of phrases like: “Mockles! Fent on silpen tree, Blockards three a-feening, Mockels, what silps came to thee, In thy pantry dreaming?” It was quite the experience seeing him conduct his own work in the home for which it was written in a program that all major music institutions could learn something from. But nothing could have prepared me for witnessing the world premiere of his Violin Concerto two days later…
Having thus spaken, I cannot embellish enough the immeasurable opportunity we who inhabit the city of angels have to experience new music ordinarily isolated to back warehouses and student halls in quite possibly the most splendid house of all. And this was far less the case prior to the heroic Finn’s arrival.
