Augusta Read Thomas
Music of rigor, balance and feeling
April 1, 2011There are basically two kinds of contemporary composer. Some, given a generous opportunity to present their music, bore their listener with too much of it. Others cruelly tantalize with little sniffs and snippets that leave the listener wanting more, more, more.
Augusta Read Thomas falls into the latter group. Ms. Thomas and members of the Walden Chamber Players visited Trinity University to offer a lecture-concert devoted entirely to her music on March 25; and a regular concert that included three brief works by Ms. Thomas, together with pieces by Joaquin Turina, Ernst Krenek and Johannes Brahms, on March 27. Both events were presented in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall.
Ms. Thomas, who spent a decade as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence and is now University Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, is a major figure and a distinctive voice among American composers.
Her music is unrepentantly modernist but not hermetic. It is rigorous -- each piece hangs together harmonically and develops compellingly from a core idea -- but it does not get its rigor from any established system. It expresses feeling and beauty, but it never stoops to neoromanticism. It is always economical and precisely machine-tooled, but the composer never loses sight of music’s purpose, to stir the spirit.
The lecture-concert was like a platter of amuse-bouches created by a master chef -- deeply pleasurable but frustratingly scant. The little bites included two complete but compact works for solo violin -- “Caprice” (2005) and “Pulsar” (2003) -- performed live by Irina Muresanu, and very brief excerpts (some live, some recorded) from five orchestral and chamber works. A recording of Two E.E. Cummings Songs for women’s chorus was playing as the audience entered the hall. All the pieces date from the past decade or so.
Between the examples Ms. Thomas spoke of her way of making music. Artists of all genres tend not to speak very illuminatingly about their own work, but Ms. Thomas was an exception. A few particularly salient self-observations:
• “I prefer forms that are very organic. The form of the piece is the result of the material,” Ms Thomas said. She doesn’t set out to write something in rondo form or sonata form “and push my material into the form.”
That’s not to say that her music is formless. Each piece does have a very general structure or shape -- Ms. Thomas described “Pulsar” as “a five-minute decrescendo,” and “Silent Moon” for violin and viola follows a fairly traditional slow-fast-slow format. But the initial idea wields pervasive influence. In the listening, it seems that the whole of each piece or movement unfolds from continual reexamination of the rhythmic, harmonic and melodic content of the opening statement.
• Speaking of the fourth movement from her orchestral piece “Jubilee,” a taut, spiky urban chase to which the tabla contributes a freewheeling, improvisational fluidity, Ms. Thomas spoke of her aim to achieve a balance between spontaneity -- “music that can turn on a dime” -- and organization. At least twice she used the word “sculpted” to describe the organized aspect.
• She gave one clue to her music’s harmonic feeling, which is both consistent and pliable: “A lot of times my pieces orbit around two pitches.”
The March 27 concert afforded full hearings of “Silent Moon” (2005) and two pieces for piano trio, “Circle Around the Sun” (2000) and "Moon Jig” (2005).
“Silent Moon” is a pensive, perhaps elegiacal piece. The opening and closing sections, flanking an agitated center, are similar in character and material: The violin (Ms. Muresanu) and viola (Christof Huebner) perform a slow pas de deux, circling each other with overlapping utterances that are closely related but not imitative.
“Circle Around the Sun” begins in calm, cold mystery, the piano (Jonathan Bass) walking a carefully plotted path above a drone on violin and cello (Ashima Scripp). The music becomes increasingly active, punctuated with spiky staccato phrases, though there also are fleeting moments of repose and of almost-romantic harmony. “Moon Jig” alternates two contrasting ideas. The rhythmically eccentric jig is announced low on the piano. The violin and cello weave longer lines around each other, in a manner similar to “Silent Moon.” Over the course of several revisits, these two ideas steadily merge into one.
The reader is urgently advised to click on this link, which leads to a generous assortment of Ms. Thomas’s music for downloading and listening.
The Walden players, longstanding champions of Ms. Thomas’s chamber works, played all three pieces beautifully and also made a fine case for Ernst Krenek’s “Parvula Corona Musicalis ad honorem Johannes Sebastianis Bach,” a 12-tone work based on the musical notes B-A-C-H. Krenek was a student of Schoenberg’s, and the piece recalls Schoenberg in its rhythmic and contrapuntal character, though Krenek’s music struck me as a little more arid than his teacher’s.
The concert opened with Joaquin Turina’s Piano Quartet in A Minor, in a performance notable for polished surfaces, incisive rhythms and complete unity. Johannes Brahms’s Horn Trio in E-flat, Op. 40, fared less well, with tempo extremes that were bracing in the fast movements but draggy in the slower ones. Young hornist Clark Matthews’s tone fit nicely into the violin-and-piano texture, but his lip was not altogether reliable.
Mike
Greenberg
