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music
| 1/28/2009 10:36:00 AM Email this article • Print this article |
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Light in Winter Festival’s ‘The Music of the Spheres’ concert at Bailey Hall, featuring a performance of Roberto Sierra’s ‘Anillos.’ (Photo by Sheryl Sinkow) |
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Planetary Wonder
Aaron P. Tate
Music and mathematics, astronomy and harmonics, spheres and intervals: terms frequently cited together in liner notes but rarely expanded beyond gee-whiz clichés. To pose questions about science and art is one thing, to make art out of those questions is another. It was the latter that was on display at this year's splendid Light in Winter festival, a carefully curated weekend of events devoted to exploring relations between science and art. If the looks on folks' faces were anything to judge by, the festival succeeded wildly in delighting adults and children alike.
The culmination of musical events this year was Sunday's performance of Roberto Sierra's Anillos, a rousing 10-minute concerto written for percussionist Tim Feeney and replete with images from the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn projected on a screen behind the Cornell orchestra. As Cassini-Huygens imaging team member Joseph Burns explained during his introductory talk, the images used for the piece were actual photographs taken of the rings of Saturn and the atmospheres of various moons. Burns' talk was not only informative but stirring to anyone with sympathy for the enormity and mystery of the cosmos; not only that, Burns managed to be funny, too ("I used to feel guilty telling folks that our project cost between one and two billion dollars, but not anymore: in this case you actually got something for your money!").
Ithacans are by now well acquainted with composer Roberto Sierra, or should be. His pieces have been commissioned and performed by the world's finest ensembles, while his recorded works have appeared on Naxos, EMI, New Albion, BMG, and numerous others labels (consult iTunes for a glimpse). Orchestras love to perform his works, I am told, because individual players love to play his parts.
The occasion for the composition of Sierra's Anillos was an Oct. 11 concert at Bailey Hall, which coincided with an exhibition of the Cassini-Huygens images at the Johnson Museum and a national scientific conference at Cornell.
Conducted by Chris Younghoon Kim and performed by the Cornell Symphony Orchestra, the world premiere was by all accounts a smashing success - the only problem being that not many of us were able to hear it, since the visiting science conference members gobbled up nearly every seat in the house (arriving 45 minutes early was no help).
For many, then, Sunday's performance was an opportunity to experience the piece for the first time. Together, with the Cassini images towering above and the kinetic grace of Tim Feeney circling the percussion instrumentation on stage, the intimacy of a Sunday afternoon concert did indeed provide a wash of much needed light during winter months; the solar radiance emitted from the images, performers, and waves of sound visibly warmed the audience.
As Sierra discussed in the introductory video-interview conducted by organizer Barbara Mink, the task of composing a musical work based on scientific images was not easily or obviously realized. Simple correspondences between ring images and musical gestures needed to be avoided, since writing in such an obvious way might risk cliché or mawkishness. Yet at the same time, as Sierra noted, there was the wish to let the beauty and wonder of Saturn's rings provide genuine inspiration for the instrumental writing.
While Sierra stopped short of explaining precisely how he went about solving this interesting compositional problem, the clarity of the performance rendered by conductor Kim and percussionist Feeney was enough to suggest certain ideas about how the piece actually works.
After the opening orchestral and percussive gestures, Feeney moved into a forbidding and virtuosic section played on vibraphone. Thirty-plus bars of notes grouped in sixes, with the occasional double stop interspersed, provided a cloud of harmonic density and horizontal movement, the unfolding of which seemed to work, perhaps, according to a ring-like logic of addition and subtraction.
Feeney next worked through cymbals, an octave of crotales, and a glockenspiel, providing in each instance small episodic cells. These ring-like episodes gave way next to three tuned gongs, which Feeney alternatively struck with mallets and scraped with what looked to be threaded bolts. Simply put, this was exhilarating stuff to watch and to hear.
Near the end, the piece built towards a driving, cyclical, pulsing section played on five drums grouped together. All the while, the orchestral parts emerged and disappeared with what felt like extreme care - not unlike the beautiful rings, in which condensed paths of dust contrasted with total darkness and the absence of interstellar residue, these lush orchestral sections suddenly came to light before vanishing again.
In the end, the piece felt more like we were the satellite and Feeney the dramatic rings of Saturn. His rhythmic lines, cells, storms, and mysteries were exquisitely built and beautiful to behold, and when they passed out of sight, we were sad to bid them farewell.
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Purgatory Hill, the Wisconsin-based duo that made its Ithaca debut this past March, is coming back to the area for a pair of shows this week: Thursday, Sept. 2 at the Rongovian Embassy in Trumansburg, and Friday, Sept. 3 at the Haunt in Ithaca. After a successful first year, New Roots, the charter school on Cayuga Street committed to sustainability and social justice, is expanding.  |
