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Women of the World Unite for New Music: the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood 2023

Writer's picture: Larry WallachLarry Wallach

Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood
Music by Gabriela Lena Frank, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Reena Esmail, and Tebogo Monnakgotla
July 27-31, 2023

Overview
Four women with globe-spanning ethnic backgrounds supplied the majority of repertory for this summer’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. The planners of this festival cannily chose this demographic to offer a built-in unity-in-diversity which turned out to be a richly
varied smorgasbord of musical challenges and delights for the audiences who attended some or all of the five main festival events. Each composer’s work reflected her ethnic background, some obviously, others in more subtle ways. The payoff was that their distinctive musical voices complemented each other and provided a wide-ranging view of what is happening today in the global world of new music through concerts devoted to each of them along with the final TMC program last Monday night that included their works for larger forces.

The diverse geographic and cultural domains that were represented include: Peru, China,
Lithuania and the USA for Frank; South Africa and Sweden for Monnakgotla; India and the USA
for Esmail; and Iceland for Thorvaldsdottir. Only the continents of Australia and Antarctica
remained unrepresented. A corresponding aesthetic and stylistic diversity manifested itself.
Frank’s musical gestures are robust, extroverted, and linked to traditions of earlier 20th century
modernism, while overtly reflecting her encounters with Peruvian music and culture.
Appropriately, she chose to include in her program Bartok’s joyfully folk-inspired “Contrasts.”
Indeed, the subtle presence of Bartok pervaded the festival, offering the model of reconciling
multiple streams of influence with the development of a thoroughly personal style.

In direct contrast, Thorvaldsdottir’s music tends to be subtle and delicate, often approaching
the boundary between noise and silence, regularly utilizing alternate performance methods
such as quarter tones, unusual bow pressure, and blowing through wind instruments with
minimal pitch content. Showing her connection to a predecessor composer, her program
included Hommage à Mihály András by Gyorgy Kurtag, and another of her pieces, Hrim, was
composed as a companion to Gyorgy Ligeti Chamber Concerto. These composers could be
considered late-20th-century Hungarian modernists, both inheritors of Bartok’s influence.

Monnakgotla’s own style seems more traditional; but for her program she chose works of a
more avant-garde character by the Swedish composers Malin Bång and Bent Sørenson, and the
South African Andile Khumalo, reflecting the diverse origins of her parents (Sweden and South
Africa); her choice of text for the large orchestral songs on the final program were poems in
French by the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, who was also the subject of her 2016
chamber opera Jean-Joseph. A conspicuous influence for these songs seems to be the music of
Debussy, just as the poetry reflects the symbolist influence of Paul Verlaine.

Finally, Esmail’s project for the past decade has been to fuse the classical traditions of North
India and Western music, one which works more organically than previous attempts such as
Ravi Shankar’s sitar concertos. This has been the fruit of collaboration with her “musical sister”
Saili Oak who not only instructed her in the Khyal (North Indian classical) style of singing, but
also participated throughout the performances on Esmail’s program. The general impression is
that her style is fundamentally lyrical and romantic.

A Closer Look
Gabriela Lena Frank’s music had been previewed on the Tanglewood Music Festival Orchestra’s
program the previous Sunday, July 23 (see my review here:
frank-and-prokofiev-in-ozawa-hall/). The three chamber works on her Thursday
program showed three facets of her wide stylistic range. The opening Sonata Serrana no. 1 for
piano duet (one piano, four hands) portray three times of day: Sun—Night—Dusk, and a final
“Karnavalito in the Quechua style”. These are all set in a Peruvian landscape, the title seeming
to refer to “mountain women.” The composer’s note refers to a folkloric concept of cultural
coexistence as formulated by the Peruvian author José Maria Arguedas, who advocated
powerfully on behalf of mixed heritages. The music makes use of a full range of the piano
keyboard and its dynamics, keeping both performers fully engaged. The presence of Peruvian
folk elements, particularly rhythm, is apparent, but at the same time the music feels fully
modern, using tonal harmonies with complex extensions. Pianists Fifi Zhang and William Shi
supplied the virtuosic brilliance required by the score with precise coordination, as if they were
one performer with four arms.

The most untraditional work in this program, as well as the earliest, drew it closer to the style
of Thorvaldsdottir. This was Las Sombras de los Apus (Shadows of the Apus) rendering the
mysterious atmosphere of the Andean high peaks which were considered gods who were not
necessarily benevolent. Like her Icelandic colleague, Frank here portrays the spirit, feel, and
sound of the landscape, in which existence can be perilous, here specifically owing to the threat
of landslides possibly triggered by shifting tectonic plates. The work is scored for four cellos
which are used atmospherically to conjure up the mists that are said to precede and serve as
warnings of landslides. This unusual scoring enables varied sound-texture elements to coexist:
mist, rolling rocks, cracking fissures, and human anxiety. Each cello is tuned a bit differently to
allow open strings to be plucked and snapped with the left hand while the right continues to
bow.

The third work on this program was for a conventional string quartet and was a set of eight
short sections, Milagros, along the lines of a number of other of Frank’s chamber works
celebrating Peruvian folk-ways. (Highly recommended are “Ritmos anchinos” for pipa, zheng,
and string quartet; and “Hilos” for clarinet, violin, and cello, all available on recordings.) The
title means “miracles” and the short sections are “milagritos”-small miracles which might be a
road marker, a broken pan pipe, or a local dance. Like the sonata, these miniature pieces are
sharply etched character sketches full of color and devoid of sentimentality or cliché. The
program was rounded out by Bartok’s Contrasts for clarinet, violin, and piano, commissioned by
Benny Goodman and based on Hungarian folk-dances perceived through the lens of Bartok’s
exhaustive ethnomusicological studies. Between it and Frank’s music there is clearly a direct
line. All of the performances by TMC students, New Fromm Players, and one BSO member,
were alert, confident, and exuberant.

Although there were overlaps (as indicated above), the music of Anna Thorvadsdottir assumes
a vastly different profile from Frank’s. Much of it is very quiet and without pulse: you hear
apparently unmeasured, sustained sounds (although the rhythmic notation is completely
specific) that only gradually morph with transitions of dynamics, colors and textures, sometimes
imperceptibly, the way weather can change in a landscape. The first two works on the program
were sets of short pieces: the first, Reminiscence, for piano in seven sections, and the second,
Spectra, for string trio in three sections. Without a score it would be impossible to know where
one piece ends and the next begins— both of these sets are actually larger single forms divided
into short phases rather than truly separate pieces. Precedents for such sets of tiny pieces go
back to Schoenberg and Webern, but a more immediate and influential predecessor is Kurtag,
whose set of miniatures for string quartet was included on this program by the composer.
Some of Thorvaldsdottir’s pieces are tiny: the final piano piece is only two measures long. Like
most of Reminiscence, it contains two layers: a sound produced by rubbing the piano strings
with either a “superball mallet” or a guitar pick, and single notes either played from the
keyboard or plucked inside the piano. She invents a special musical staff along with the
conventional one, in which the piano strings are depicted along with a wavy line illustrating the
motion of the mallet. Generally the textures are thin, but some pieces are performed in the
conventional way, only from the keyboard. The pieces quote each other, strengthening the
impression that this is all one larger work, in which the single pitches reverberate against a
sonic background that seems to place them within a vast space.

Spectra treats the three strings as a kind of mega-instrument which produces subtle complex
colors through their interactions. Like her larger works, the textures are not about melody,
harmony, or counterpoint in any traditional sense, but about the integration of wave-forms into
new sound-colors; the title Spectra may point to the influence of the so-called “spectralist”
school of composition which arose in conjunction with the development of computer music,
primarily in France, of which the late Kari Saariaho was a powerful exemplar, as is
Thorvaldsdottir’s mentor Tristan Murail. This is not to detract from the uniqueness of
Thorvaldsdottir’s voice, but many of her techniques and aesthetic approaches have recent
antecedants. While Ligeti and Kurtag are explicitly acknowledged, I would add yet one more,
Giacinto Scelsi, an older composer whose radically athematic scores from the 50’s and 60’s
anticipate much of what contemporary spectralist composers sound like.
Of the three larger ensemble pieces that concluded this program, two were conducted by
Stephen Drury of the TMC faculty, and one by Agata Zajac, one of the hard-working conducting
fellows. All three works share the basic characteristics of quietude, with disruptions which are
most apparent in Hrim for a more or less conventional chamber orchestra with single strings
and extended percussion. Aequilibria is similar, but uses alto flute and bass clarinet to produce
a mellower surface and even more blended tone colors. Ró is unusually scored for bass flute
and bass clarinet as the only winds (no brass) along with percussion, piano (with those special
performing techniques), and single strings without double bass. It has the most seamless flow
of sound, as called for in a poetic and characteristic note in the score: “When you see a long
sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the
distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling. It is a way of measuring time and noticing
the tiny changes that happen as you walk further along the same thin rope. Absolute
tranquility with the necessary amount of concentration needed to perform the task.”
Thorvaldsdottir goes on to write “Brokenness refers to subtle vulnerability and fragility but
does not indicate a state of being ‘ruined’ or ‘in pieces’—it indicates a fragile state of
wholeness.” Rather than sounding broken, my impression at the end was of an uninterrupted
stream of melodic sound in the winds to the point where I wondered if the performers had
been practicing circular breathing.
Reena Esmail’s program on Saturday afternoon in the Linde Center’s Studio E included
commentary about each work by the composer, who speaks engagingly about her life, growth,
and decision to integrate Indian music into her practice. Of Indian-American heritage, she grew
up in Los Angeles and trained as a classical musician (pianist, then composer) with little
awareness of her cultural background, especially its music. Developing curiosity about it, she
eventually went to India on a Fulbright in 2011-12 where she received a classical Hindustani
musical training (which means learning through long hours of imitation) and started to think of
herself as a translator between her two traditions; her subsequent Yale doctoral thesis was
intitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians
(2018).
Many, if not all, works on her program are built around the Indian scales called rags or raags.
These are easy for listeners to identify but have subtle complexities of shape and articulation
that supply the composer with pre-determined melodic elements. For this composer who fuses
two such complex and disparate traditions, a key to success lies in the presence of her
collaborator, the singer Saili Oak, whom she was fortunate enough to encounter at the
beginning of this project. Oak performed (as a singer) in two of the major works on this
program, Ragamala and Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz, as well as in an encore in vocal duet with the
composer herself; but their collaborative bond was apparent throughout. The first piece, for
solo violin, entitled Darshan (Seeing), utilized two raags, Bhag and Charukeshi. To prepare the
audience, Esmail asked Oak to briefly perform them, attuning our ears to their sounds, and our
eyes to the beautiful hand gestures that she used to accompany them, certain gestures
occurring at appropriate points in the scales themselves. The composition was performed with
great purity and nuance by violinist Sage Park.
This was followed by the third movement of a piano trio, marked “Capricious.” As in Hindustani
music, a monophonic melody is accompanied by a less conspicuous background layer; here the
piano plays a lively raag in octaves and in asymmetrical phrases, occasionally accenting a note
with a rolled chord, while the strings shake and pluck in the background. Eventually the piano
divides into parts and morphs into background textures while the strings drop out, only to reenter
with the melodic material divided into short phrases that are thrown rapidly between
them in the style termed “jawab sawal,” or “question and answer” between melody instrument
and tabla (drums) that often marks a phase of a full raag performance. Eventually, the strings
play together in counterpoint (primarily in contrary motion) but using the rhythms and phrasing
established at the outset. In the next section, the piano sets up a different background phrase
and each instrument gets a longer solo full of raag-like inflections (grace-notes, slides, etc).
They come together again, this time playing in octaves, and the ornaments blossom into long
runs and slides, along with piano glisses spanning the keyboard, as the music grows more
excited. Suddenly the music returns to the beginning and the whole process is repeated, this
time leading to an even more exciting climax in which the strings and the piano strum and
pound out wide open harmonies, again reminiscent of the climactic final moments of a raag
performance, before returning briefly and in backwards order to the calm of the opening. I
have described this movement in detail to indicate how resourcefully Esmail has taken over
Hindustani characteristics in a way that works idiomatically on western instruments, and to give
some idea of how exciting and appealing this is for the audience. Fortunately it has been
recorded and so the music is available for those who missed this performance or wish to hear
the other three movements.
Esmail’s writing for voice is particularly effective as befits a singer-composer. Who Makes a
Clearing is a setting for soprano, violin, and cello, of a poem by Wendell Berry which offers an
image of a cleared field as a dual metaphor: for collaborating with nature, and for making a
space for aesthetic contemplation. The voice and instruments play equally important roles, and
the music draws on an improvisatory type of raag called alap. The vocal was beautifully
performed by soprano Eva Martinez. The other programmed vocal piece, Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz
(My Sister’s Voice), was set more elaborately for two voices, Western and Hindustani singers in
duet, with string quartet and piano, supplemented by moments of prerecorded material. The
take-off point her is the “Flower Duet” from Lakme by Delibes (based on a story about the
daughter of a Brahmin priest); a recording of that piece of lush romanticism blends into a live
continuation as the music began to morph into a complex layering of composed and partially
improvised vocal material, with the instrumental parts extended in the manner of a developing
raag. The text celebrates the sisterhood of the singing voices, performed by Oak and Robin
Steitz, and celebrates by implication the sisterhood of the composer and her collaborator. The
music enacts this with the harmonious interaction of the Western and Hindustani performers,
richly supported by Western harmonies and raag scale material.
I missed the program devoted to Tebogo Monnakgotla’s music (it was held at 10 am on Sunday
morning) but have been able to catch up with enough of her compositions to get the
impression that she has a wide stylistic range that cannot be succinctly described. Like Frank,
her music does not rely heavily on alternative performing techniques, even though one of the
scores she chose as a companion piece for her program, Arching by Malin Bang, uses a variety
of amplified tools (literally!) as sound sources. The three songs I heard on the final TMC
program were more conventionally scored for normal orchestra with extra percussion including
several metallophones. This song-cycle Un clin d’oei (a blink of an eye), to poetry by
Rabearivelo, puts the spotlight on the French lyrics, set sensitively for baritone (here
performing duties were shared by Rolfe Dauz in the first song and Kevin Douglas Jasaitas in the
others). The music moves in planes of long, stable pitch areas sustained by trills, tremelos, and
ostinati, with harmonies that would feel at home in the music of Debussy. Textures tend to be
thinner, leaving lots of room for the voice, and the French scansion is thoroughly idiomatic,
sometimes bordering on the sung speech characteristic of the impressionist chanson;
particularly in the powerful delivery of Rolfe Dauz, the lyrics could be clearly understood
without amplification or supertitles. Rabearivelo’s poetry powerfully explores liminal states of
consciousness: between waking and sleeping, reality and dreams, the self and the world, the
eyes of a child and the stars, youth and old age entwining their fingers to form a footbridge
between twilight and sunrise. This is beautifully reflected in the constantly varying shimmer of
Monnakgotla’s orchestral textures.
There are two large take-aways from the great variety of music heard at the Festival. The first
is the wide scope of style and invention among the works of these four composers, each of
whom takes a highly individual approach to projecting their voice through their works. There is
no core orthodoxy shared by any of them; this is not the earlier modernist period when
composers were presented with the choice of being influenced by either Schoenberg or
Stravinsky (although some chose not to). If there is a common predecessor here, it would be
Bartok, but refracted into a spectrum of approaches from such widely divergent figures as
Alberto Ginastera, Gyorgy Kurtag, Gyorgy Ligeti, to which I would add Henri Dutilleux and Carlos
Chavez, along with the masters of non-Western traditions from India, Africa, and Asia. The
second is that all this variety was presented in forms that had great audience appeal, stemming
not only from contrasts but from a common mastery of large color palettes, whether in a work
for a single instrument or large orchestra. Unlike previous festivals, there were no works that
failed to captivate and hold my attention, and the enthusiastic audiences seemed to agree.
Raagmaala
A composition with every line set to a different raag one after the other, like a woven garland
(mala) of raags.

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© 2024 by Larry Wallach.

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