Festival in Residence: Ann Arbor (June 14)

Friday, June 14 | 7:30 p.m.

Kerrytown Concert House

Artists | Yvonne Lam, The Dolphins Quartet, Trio Gaia

PROGRAM NOTES | © Ty Bouque 2024

Tonight’s program unifies around the formative: what, at a crucial moment in time, impresses on our sense of self with such force that who we are is forever cast by the memory of its intensity. These are rarely the big moments in life; often what is formative is small in scale, a smell, a texture, some brief and passing interaction with the world when we are young that has a disproportionate influence on how we understand ourselves. The work of the artist is, in many ways, a constant labor of impossible return to that primary state of full-bodied sensation; the formative, the “original memory” of being-human in the world, is what art attempts to give back to us for a moment.

Understanding the music of Joan Tower, for example, requires knowing the timid nine- year-old she once was. A small child, uprooted from the quiet of New Rochelle and relocated to Bolivia at the height of its national revolution, finds in her father’s new workplace a sonic and geologic culture that upends everything she understands. Tower cites her love of rhythm and of color in the sweaty memory of an equatorial nation in revolt, but her geologic predilection dates from these years as well. Tower’s father, a mineralogist working in extraction mines in South America, instilled in her an early expertise for thinking about the materiality of the Earth. Rock is a substance of power and endurance, but also constant change, subject to pressure and to heat; it is utilitarian, the bedrock of housing and the thing on which nations are built; it is also a symbol, a metaphor of birth and of belonging to the ground, flush with mythic properties for healing, protection, and strength.

Tower’s White Granite belongs to a collection of pieces—Black Topaz (1976) and Silver Ladders (1986) the most famous among them—whose musical language draws on these many physical and metaphoric qualities of their titular minerals. Granite, so named for its grain, belongs to a class of rock called phanerite whose distinguishing quality is the coarse visibility of its comprising crystals: there are no pure surfaces or smooth edges in granite, only endless, glittering variation sprawled out in all directions. Tower’s music follows suit: every large gesture is scattered with small breakages, streaks of charcoal, ash, beige and ivory knit across the surface, veins of snowy variegation that never perfectly repeat. It is the idea or image of “white granite” as translated into sound.

Tower’s mineral works are thus not documents of lithography—we do not hear fractional crystallization or the cooling of magma taking place—so much as poetic cross-sections of their object, loving inspections of the stone in question. White Granite turns the slab over in one hand, zooms close into its crystal composites, pulls it out to inspect its roughshod edges, traces a dusty finger on the ridge of its fracture, tastes the earthen richness of its chalky powder, feels the weight of centuries in this small piece of a planet. That early childhood insight, instilled by her father, that even the most solid and imposing masses in our world are divisible into the tiniest particulate crystal, has guided Tower’s work for nearly six decades. In White Granite, it’s easy to imagine the thrilled fascination of a nine-year-old seated by her father’s side, captivated by these fragments of stone in her small hands, by their weight, their texture, and the way they refract the beating South American sun.

The Dolphin Miniatures are, not dissimilarly, all fleeting attempts at capturing the incandescent knowledge of substances that, early in life, sketch out our thresholds of pleasure and sublimity. Each of the movements, written in turn by members of the quartet, maps the physical properties of a formative childhood moment into the realm of sound. The fizz of a first sparkling drink; the planar vastness of the first sight of the ocean; the sound of rain on a childhood roof; the half-memory of a pre-school song: these are small moments, perhaps, but the kind so rich in sensory overload at the start of our existence that they never quite lose their luster, no matter how far away from them we get. The seven miniatures tonight thus testify to a kind of group ethos: each time these four individuals play music at all, they revisit in some way these core, early memories.

With Antonin Dvořák, what is formative is much harder to distinguish on the basis of material. Dvořák operates with a kind of blunt omnivorousness; he borrows, bargains, lifts and loves music from all corners of the world with a kind of indiscriminate fascination. He is curious, a collector: American spirituals, Moravian folk dances, German opera, English choral music—it can all get translated into his sound world without so much the batting of an eye.

But there is a kind of core sensibility that guides the how along which these musical objects arrive in his vocabulary. Dvořák gravitates towards emotional extremes that are inextricable from their sense of place. His music wagers a kind of double motion, reaching upwards towards the limit-states of human sensation—grief, ecstasy, rage, pride, lust—while keeping one foot firmly planted in the soil of their upbringing. Raised in the foothills of Bohemia where music was in turn financial survival, social modality, and cultural identity, the intensity of his music can’t be separated from its where: what is formative is thus an idea of place that gives rise to energy in music, emotion as interlocked with landscape.

In the fourth Piano Trio, Dvořák abandons classical forms and instead borrows from the folk music of his native Eastern Europe. Each of the six sections is a discrete “dumka,” a Ukrainian epic lament song traditionally delivered by itinerant bards with nothing but a small bandora for accompaniment. Though the means were often minimal and painfully local, these songs were immense things, testimonies to the generational memories of captive people and their struggles. The “dumka”—the word literally means “rhapsodic thought,” thought letting itself be drawn out beyond a natural limit—is the perfect kind of keyword for thinking about Dvořák and his music. Each of the sections trace huge emotional arcs without ever leaving the key in which they start. They are stabilized by place, both geographical and musical, capable of extremity because of their foundation. Dvořák, a Czech who traveled as far as Iowa before returning home, knew this about the formative: like those traveling bards with their songs and their bandoras, we carry our roots with us through the years.

© Ty Bouque 2024