Saturday night typically finds me knitting in my p.j.s and watching TV. Sometimes I break up the routine by renting an action flick and popping some corn for the lads. Pigging out on Good & Plenty and Gummy Bears is about as wild as I get.
Last Saturday night, I got off the couch and entered an alternate dimension via “Ars Subtilior,” a Community MusicWorks concert of experimental music curated by CMW cellist Laura Cetilia, who also performed. It was held at 500 Broad Street, an unoccupied store front with a changing landscape of passing neighbors and street traffic. Ask CMW musician Chase Spruill about the curious raccoon.
“Ars Subtilior” (a more subtle art) was inspired by some late-fourteenth-century composers who played with notation and rhythm in their scores and set a precedent for today's avante garde composers. Who knew? The program began with two works by Canadian composer Andre Cormier performed concurrently: “Quator Cetilia” and “Quator Chandelle.” As you might have guessed, Cormier wrote the former specifically for Laura. She was accompanied by marimba, electric guitar and melodica, which was new to me. It looks like a miniature keyboard with a mouthpiece and sounds like a polite saxophone. “Quator Chandelle” requires four performers to light and then extinguish four sets of 12 candles. The pieces began and ended together in darkness. If you've ever attended vespers or listened to medieval chants, you'll have some notion of what the 20 audience members shared for an hour, but not the essence of the experience. Unlike chants, with their comforting sonority, Cormier's work exposes music's skeleton and shows us how the spaces between the bones (silence) are as necessary as the bones themselves. The music consisted of the barest minimum: a brief theme on cello punctuated by single notes on the other instruments. First sound, then silence. Silence, then sound. Meanwhile, the candle lighters solitarily struck matches and touched them to wicks. None of the eight performers, including CMW friends Sakiko Mori and Kimberly Young, played or gestured together. Each occupied his or her own universe, although sympathetic responses seemed to occur.
First, a confession: About 20 minutes in, I drifted into a light, dreamy state. I've fallen asleep in many venues, from large lecture halls and cathedrals to small theaters and library carrels (blame my recurring insomnia) but never has a nap felt so surreal and so enriched by the atmosphere. I came to after a 10-minute dreamscape featuring Elton John, fresh-squeezed lemonade, a funeral and the sense that we are all very alone (funeral) but undeniably connected (refreshing beverage, “Tiny Dancer”). By the hour's close, I was both hungry for complicated sound and refreshed by its absence. Not a bad takeaway from a Saturday night.
Next up was Swiss composer Jurg Frey's “Streichtrio,” performed by Laura and CMW musicians Lisa Barksdale (violin) and Chloe Kline (viola). The musicians created unusual (for strings) sounds by touching strings adjacent to the bowed strings for long, relaxed, harmonic-filled chords played in unison. Again, silence had as much weight as sound, and allowed the music to take up much more space in listeners' brains than we typically concede. How many concerts have I spent parsing the cellist's technique or wondering where the lady in the front row bought her jacket? Last Saturday night, I surrendered completely to the sound and the silence and felt a little bit larger for it.
-Linda Daniels, CMW parent and board Vice-President
What a beautiful write-up, Linda! Thank you so much for this and also for being there! ~Lisa
Posted by: Lisa Barksdale | October 23, 2013 at 09:49 PM