What a magnificent arc of thought! That you can hear life coming at you! That history is not a ponderous weight but an accelerating force, an upwardly arching glissando that connects the past to the present! Such an idea could only have been born in the West – in a place of such capacious dimensions that an individual must triangulate his or her position amongst crisscrossing vectors by sound. In a vast and complex space one hears rather than sees his or her place.
This concert – my first as Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players – bears the mark of the West by presenting the “most western” pieces of three fertile musical imaginations.
Some might be quick to object that neither Edgard Varèse nor Josh Levine, two composers whose artistic foundations were laid in Europe, should be considered Westerners. But in the echoing thumps and tintinnabulations of Levine’s Transparency distance and loudness are confounded as they often are in large spaces. Are the soft bass drum sounds near and quiet, or are they enormous booms arriving at our ears across great distances? As for Varèse, Octandre marks an important point in his steady westward migration. If the tone poems of his Berlin period – now regrettably lost to history – prompted Varèse to move west to New York and create Amériques, the serpentine and questing lines of Octandre set the stage for his spiritual pilgrimage to the desert near Santa Fe, and by extension to the stark landscapes of later pieces like Déserts and Etude pour Espace. Each of the three terse movements of Octandre begins with a single inwardly rotating line – heard in oboe, piccolo, and contrabass respectively. And in each case that line is turned outward, westward one could say, to become an outbound vector within the corporeal intelligence that is Varèse’s sound world.
As tonight’s concert itself expands outward from shorter to longer works, we arrive at Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, John Luther Adams’s hour-long essay on the perturbations of tonality scored for large mixed chamber ensemble. John is my lifelong friend, so I feel I can say that the traditional view of his music as being “about the environment” is not completely right. In my view John’s music is not about place, it is place. More than thirty years ago when John mobilized northward to join a growing army of environmentalists determined to protect Alaska’s wild spaces he found – as he has told me many times – his true home. But this home is not located in Fairbanks; it does not have a zip code. His home is any space large enough to defy facile navigation. In John’s music, most particularly in Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing, a listener is challenged to locate him or herself within a large musical space without the aid of the compass points of traditional compositional architecture. Using the simplest device – an outwardly expanding series of intervals, from unison through minor second, major second, thirds and onward to the octave – he creates sonic clouds and chorales of increasing harmonic permeability and emotional agency.
On another purely happy day five years ago – this one higher on my all-time list than the Stegner realization – I arrived in San Francisco on foot. I had walked from San Diego to propose marriage to Brenda, who lived in the city then, and who is now my wife. After six weeks and 700 miles of walking I summitted the final hill, and the whole city – the bay, the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate – lay spread out before me. John’s music had been very much on my mind in those final days. At the time I imagined this was prompted by the seductive soundscape of coastal California. Now I see it was a response to the great joy of traversing an unknown space and of arriving finally at a beautiful and promising place.
- Steven Schick
