Ensemble White Rabbit, performing works by The Harvard Group for New Music Paine Hall

White Rabbit’s supporting role may be related to the program’s contemplative nature: Eric Hewitt’s seven-person ensemble specializes in strenuous works of taxing expressionism.  And indeed, White Rabbit’s residence since 2006 has arguably helped lead Harvard’s graduate composers in that direction. In recent years HGNM has focused its experimentalism on instruments rather than other media, its intellectualism on literary models rather than abstract ones.  It has also moved towards extravagantly expressive programming.  Regardless of whether White Rabbit’s presence helped to effect this shift, the group has surely enjoyed it.  The performers have endless energy and curiosity, and Hewitt as a conductor specializes in rigorous control of seemingly chaotic textures.  White Rabbit and HGNM have worked together in what has amounted to a three-year mutual master-class on extended instrumental techniques and new writing for small groups; and the concertgoer’s benefit has taken the form of ambitious concerts sounding as études for ensemble. 

These last few years, then, have been exhilarating but rarely subtle, and that’s part of why the April 25 concert was so delightful.  This concert remained hushed and contemplative for extended periods, and those opportunities for reflection well suited a program of considerable intellectualism.  Indeed, although HGNM composers have obvious scholarly inclinations they’re often less than eager to present them in a straightforward way.  But unmasked by clutter on Saturday evening, their rigor was revealed to be edifying and refreshing for the listener.  Of particular note was the concert’s unironic consideration of the relationship between history and memory.  Those who would associate such a conceit with conservatism may not be surprised to learn that a majority of works on the program featured tonal or quasi-tonal elements.  Consider music’s temporalism, though, and how we perceive that temporality as musicians and as listeners.  Surely we must include in this inquiry music’s own status as memory and history.  This may compel consideration of topics such as transcription, transmission, reception, and duration: and these very subjects appeared throughout this evening’s sincere and inclusive colloquy.

Christopher Hasty’s Enfolding two – Unfolding you for violin and viola (from a planned four-movement set) experimented with the multiple temporal levels of musical perception: here tonal materials, not a typical resource for Hasty, were utilized for their own multiple temporal associations.  Tonality qua historical style, for example, speaks to memory as a music of times lost; tonality qua musical syntax makes its own demands on listeners’ sense of time through linear counterpoint.  Hasty’s piece uses this historical dynamism to examine the instability of the memories listeners form as they hear a sounded work.  It also speaks to the all-but-neglected utility of tonal materials within experimental composition: a sudden, fragile perfect fourth or unison may be a profoundly meaningful effect, encumbered neither by Romanticism nor irony.  Enfolding two – Unfolding you suggested with reverence that a music perceived as duration is no more stable in memory than a music perceived as a sequence of moments.

An analogous ephemerality is the poignant theme of [Martin] Bresnick’s Songs of the mouse people (1999), Book I / Volume I of which concluded the program’s first half.  Based on Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People,” Bresnick’s short songs combine quasi-narrative references to the story with unironic explorations of what a mouse music would sound like.  These songs worked well with the newer pieces on Saturday’s program, partly due to their transparency and delicacy but also because of their literary inspiration: Kafka’s story portrays a music that must vanish with the disappearance of its singer.  In this case the sounding work itself transmits what Kafka’s voiceless mice cannot; and needless to say, Songs of the mouse people can only accomplish this with the accessory of our memory.

A similar kind of sonic memorial could be heard within short works by Jean-Francois Charles and Ulrich Kreppein.  Charles’s Aqua Solo is a two-movement étude for double bass extracted from a multi-media work composed in 2004.  Its first, arco movement “reminds us,” in Charles’s own words, “that the double bass is a descendant of the viol”; the second movement, a pizzicato study titled “Blues,” employs timbres and sounds associated in the memory with the upright basses of blues and jazz.  Kreppein’s Abendlied, for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano, evoked a different sort of musical history, regarding not organology but genre.  Abendlied’s transparent division of performing forces—into melody (winds) and accompaniment (strings), with piano acting as a rhythm section—was nostalgic vis-à-vis a historical song repertoire itself inescapably nostalgic.

The two most extroverted works on Saturday’s concert shared the second half of the program.  Tolga Yayalar’s In the temporal gardens, for piano solo, was inspired by the poetry of the Turkish writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, and in particular by what Yayalar sees as Tanpinar’s dualist subjectivity.  Yayalar’s program notes identify a number of dichotomies represented by the piece’s “musical layers” and the relationships among them; I found it rewarding to focus on “internal and external time” in particular, as that dichotomy resonated with the works preceding Yayalar’s on the program.  Thus the pianist’s staccato exclamations may be the buffeting impositions “external” time makes upon a subject, while the resonant sonorities arising from the strings of silently depressed keys evoke the seizure-like reverie of relapse into “internal” time. 

Saturday’s program ended with two other Bresnick works extracted from a larger grouping—in this case, “The Bucket Rider” and “BE JUST!” from his 1995 set Opere della Musica Povera.  Like Songs of the Mouse People, these two works for clarinet, cello, double bass, electric guitar, piano, and percussion were based on writings of Franz Kafka.  “The Bucket Rider” worked well following Yayalar’s work on the program; its ominous depiction of a wasting beggar was dreamlike and delicate.  “BE JUST!”, in contrast, was bombastic compared to the evening’s other works; the only piece including an amplified instrument or non-pitched percussion, this work’s forceful telling of “In the Penal Colony” was an especially incongruous closing piece more flatteringly considered as a sort of encore.  It was, for one thing, the concert’s only chance to see the boisterous White Rabbit we’ve come to know and love: and one would have to say that it was only appropriate for Hewitt’s group to conclude the last HGNM concert of the academic year.

And it must further be said that this was an exceptionally well-played concert.  Alex Tarbert played Charles’s Aqua Solo with charisma and focus; Yayalar wrote In the temporal gardens for Seda Röder, and her performance was muscular and knowing.  (Seda and Jean-Francois, I should note, are friends of mine).  The concert’s duets were enthralling, particularly the obviously demanding Enfolding two – Unfolding you, played with appropriate intimacy by Gabriel Boyers and Jason Fisher.  The works for ensemble received meticulous attention even at their moments of melodrama; as with the compositions on the program, though, the performers were at their best when sounding strands of contemplation within delicate and transparent textures.

Written by AG