Strata Echo
Tuesday, June 17; 7:00 PM
Ty Bouque
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Tonight we return to that most fundamental of musical and architectural materials, the formal device par excellence: we return to lines. And we return to lines by way of the woman whose visual imagination and material dexterity gave the Great Lakes Festival such a prerogative to think this year about form and structure; one of her textiles lends the title for this concert. Ruth Adler Schnee’s Strata Echo looks, if we have music on the brain (and its title certainly suggests sound), like a cross-section of a wave form. Computer-generated spectral imaging of sound turns up likewise piles of bandwidths, lines of varying thicknesses and curves meant to visually replicate the acoustic fluctuations of frequencies as they move through air. The miracle of Strata Echo, however, on closer inspection, is that Adler Schnee’s lines don’t only flow, like a flat spectrogram, left to right, up and down. In small jets of energy, her bands of color—always two, giving each vector its “echo” pair below it—begin to weave in 3D space as well, trading between foreground and background as they cross the z-axis. The visual dimension on the one hand reiterates what is happening in the physical material: strands (in this case cotton and wool) are being woven artfully together.
Hannah Kendall’s Network Bed could not be more apt for such an environment. The work relies a meticulous series of hand-offs to ensure that one member of the quartet is at any given time holding fast to a single note, around which the other three dance in jolting rhythms that echo and rebound in tiny bursts. Like the Adler Schnee, Kendall’s title says much indeed: “Network Bed” calls to mind the anatomical term for the criss-crossing network of vessels bringing blood to various organs in a body. That highly complicated lacing, called a “capillary bed,” works as a decentralized system along which blood flows in all directions to connect distant physical regions with their animating heart. And Kendall, too, connects distant emotional arenas by complex maneuvers of line and space. Kendall’s
quartet is the most literal on tonight’s program, erecting horizons (strata) that serve as a kind of fixed spatial reference against which the mirage of 3D space flashes in and out of sight.
Meanwhile, Frank Bridge sets what could be a single layer of Adler Schnee’s strata to music, chasing a thick, slow band as it arcs up, pivots, thins, and curls. While the Cello Sonata bears the unmistakable impressions of war’s outbreak—a heavy futility hangs over its opening movement—despondency fails to restrict its real sense of propulsion, and at every turn one can hear Bridge fleeing from those old formal constrictions and towards something like fantasia, the endless unspooling of a single thread to distant and unexpected ends. Bridge—most famous to historians as the teacher of Benjamin Britten, but a composer of exceptional craftsmanship in his own right—is perhaps responsible for the 20th-century trend in British music towards intense command of linear space (of which Birtwistle and Adès are the most famous inheritors); one can hear why in the audible geometry of the sonata. Attend, for instance, to the spiraling harmonies at the opening of the sonata’s second movement. Where in Wagner those strange sonorities would have most certainly been chords, here Bridge breaks them up into vectors to be stretched, drawn, and pulled: music itself has become an exercise in hearing space itself, full of rich and strange gravities.
And Dvořák, finally, enfolds both. Like Bridge, Dvořák treats time as a plastic space (density and pulse changing at a rapid rate). Like Kendall, the difference between static horizons and crossing flashes of verticality (those arpeggio bursts in the piano, but also durable stabilizers holding in the strings) scaffold a multi-dimensional world. Both work together to create that strange combination for which Adler Schnee herself is so famous: there are rules here, strict ones, but they result in an intuitive sense of freshness and revelation whose transformational power feels almost improvisatory.
Accordingly, the Piano Quintet No. 2—originally intended to be an update on the first, which he found utterly unpublishable and disappointing—changes gears on a dime, a virtuosic treatment of pace that buffets material about like so many of Adler Schnee’s z-axis winds. The quintet is quintessential Dvořák that way: a host of found materials—Czech dances and songs, mostly; another of his famous dumka, the Ukrainian laments, grounds the second movement—are stitched through a funhouse of both rigorously formal processes (canons, structures) and intuitively creative affects. The very thing that has made Dvořák so pleasurable to audiences for so many years, his sense of never dwelling too long in a single place, is what makes him so apt for a concert inspired by Strata Echo: one can never quite be sure the direction a line will take, and the endlessly thrilling variety that burgeons from so simple an idea is at once emotionally thrilling and a technical marvel. One can always lose oneself inside it, without ever feeling truly lost.
Lines, in this concert, have a tendency to make hairpin turns: follow them at will, zoom in or zoom out, and hear why time and space in music are never truly opposites.