Just for All of Us

Young composer Maxwell McKee had a confession to make.  While he was writing a composition commissioned by Contemporaneous, he was suffering from an acute case of Ligeti’s Syndrome.  (György Ligeti, after whom this syndrome is named, is best known to many as the composer whose music appears in soundtracks of Stanley Kubrick films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

As McKee explained, “What Ligeti’s syndrome is is basically when you’re up against and so deeply involved with this music that you believe is perfect, you know, mathematically and emotionally, in so many ways perfect, an ideal music, how do you write something in the face of that?”



The occasion of his comment was Contemporaneous’s first home-base concert of 2012, Just for Us.  On the docket were not just one or two, but six world premiere performances.  In introducing the evening, co-artistic director Dylan Mattingly, with his usual aplomb, put the challenge in perspective:  “Part of the excitement to me of hearing something completely new is that you have no idea what it’s going to be.  Nothing has proved it not the best thing in the world.”

All but one of the composers featured were born in 1991 or 1992; the elder statesman of the group was Lawton Hall (born in 1987, a fact of which he made amusing note).  They hailed from Mexico City, the two US Coasts, and points in between.  Aside from Mattingly, I’d heard music of two, McKee and Adam Zuckerman, at a student recital about a year before.  I was eager to hear from them again; as to the remaining three, I looked forward to what was in store.

Andrés Martínez de Velasco Escobedo's Dubio

Andrés Martínez de Velasco Escobedo’s Dubio, for violin and chamber orchestra, opened the concert.  After the concert, Leonardo Pineda, the fine violinist for whom de Velasco Escobedo wrote the piece, teased the composer about its difficulty.  The phrase that had seemed so easy when the composer tried it out on a toy violin turned out to involve huge leaps.  You wouldn’t have known it, though, from Pineda’s lyrical performance.

The piece opens with a set of gentle piano chords, and Pineda’s violin steals in on a tumbling lament.  The orchestra swells and falls away as the violin keens in passages of plaintive beauty.  With a patter of notes, the music emerges from a darkened byway to land in the midst of a fractured circus parade.  On a harp’s ethereal plucks, the parade moves out of sight and the music shifts again.  From within a shimmering soundscape, a trumpet beckons the violin to resume its place, and the music fades to a poignant close.

Molly Joyce's Dollhouse

Next up was Dollhouse, by Molly Joyce.  Joyce, a Juilliard student, explained that the piece, for chamber ensemble, came out of a dark time when she was questioning her “whole pursuit of a career as a composer.”  The Dollhouse came to represent for her “the idea of predictability and unpredictability in our lives.”



The piece begins on a single, repeated note from the piano, an auditory semaphore signaling distress.  The music proceeds in rhythmic bursts, gathering instruments to build layers of sound.  The strings lift the ensemble to harrowing heights, anchored by the horns.  The pulse returns, insistent.  The music subtly changes as a long-lined lyricism threads its way through the tumult.  The strings sing out, not in blinkered belief, but in a determined “I can.”  As the piece comes to a close, a drum beats out a new semaphore:  “I can, and I will.”

Lawton Hall's Hypothetical Patterns of Public-Private Conflict

Lawton Hall recently graduated and now supports himself, as so many in his position must, with part-time jobs.  Work on his piece, Hypothetical Patterns of Public-Private Conflict, took place, of necessity, in his limited free time.  “I realized,” he said, that “composing has become a very solitary, private experience for me.”  In this context, performance of the piece gained particular significance:  “Eventually I gave the score to David [Bloom], and David gave the parts to all these wonderful musicians, and now it’s presented to the public, and it’s this whole big birthing process that we all can be a part of.”

A lone horn’s solemn notes sound the beginning of Hypothetical Patterns of Public-Private Conflict.  Note by artfully chosen note, the instruments entwine in angular elegance, colliding in dissonance and unraveling in turns. The sound lines dissolve in a susurrus of percussion and voice, and the music closes on the horn's faint echo of its opening call.

Maxwell McKee's Double Quintet with Percussion

In his Double Quintet with Percussion, McKee demonstrates, as he had with his student recital piece Double Helix, a gift for graceful melodic line.  Double Quintet begins with a series of gently falling notes.  McKee knows how to take his time, how to let the music develop its meditative point.  On a flutter of winds, the music turns its face toward a lovely, lilting rhythm, and plucked strings carry us along its joyful path.  The music builds, in a gently rocking motion, toward an ecstatic end.

Adam Zuckerman's Reels

Adam Zuckerman’s first words, as he strode onstage, were these:  “I’d like to preface this by saying that I think I coined the term ‘Ligeti’s Syndrome.’”



The biting musical intelligence that informs that remark, as it informed his fine Quintet at the student recital, is powerfully at work in Reels.  The first notes set the music out on a brazenly dissonant limb, and it’s hard to fathom how Zuckerman will reel it back.  The oboe and clarinet, spellbinding sorcerers hauntingly played by Stuart Breczinski and Brad Cherwin, lead the way, their sinuous lament disrupted by percussive gestures from the piano and strings.  On descending piano chords, ringing out like fearsome bells, the winds let out their last ghostly cries, and the piece dies away on a solitary reed.

Dylan Mattingly's A Way A Lone A Last A Loved A Long the Riverrun

The concert closed with a piece from Dylan Mattingly, A Way A Lone A Last A Loved A Long the Riverrun.  Though it takes as its title the first words from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, its musical roots lie deep in the byways of Americana, notably the folk field recordings gathered by Lomax father and son. The piece is scored for bassoon, percussion (including garbage can), violin, cello, and contrabass.  The bassoon, played with bluesy panache by David Adam Nagy, takes center stage to exuberant effect.  I believe this piece is fully notated and scored, yet it speaks from the vibrant, vital heart that is particular to improvisation.

As I listen, I’m taken to a wide veranda overlooking the Mississippi River, where I sit in a weathered rocker with friends on either side.  We look down the river, searching for the music that’s been riding on the wind to where we sit.  Off a ways, but not so far we can’t make it out, we see the intrepid David Bloom conducting the magnificent musicians of Contemporaneous.

We realize what we’ve been hearing is the concert I’ve just described.  We know how fragile the future of a new composition can be, how often its first performance might also be its last.  We know, too, that, though this concert may have begun Just for Us, it is too fine, too precious, simply to disappear. We want it to have a longer life; we want it to be heard.  We want it to become a concert not Just for Us, but for all of us.

My friends and I, there on the veranda, nod to one another.  We stand and applaud, we hoot and holler.  We shout out to them, hands cupped around our mouths so the sound will carry, and here is what we say:

“Ligeti, schmigeti.  Who needs Ligeti?  You, composers and musicians of Contemporaneous, follow your muses, and we will follow you.”

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To hear the six pieces premiered in the concert Just for Us, click here. 

For a complete program and list of musicians who played each piece, click here.  David Bloom conducted throughout.

Credits:  The photographs of the fine musicians of Contemporaneous that appear at the head and foot of the post can be found here and here.  With grateful thanks to Contemporaneous and the composers for making audio of this extraordinary concert available and for permission to include it on Prufrock's Dilemma in conjunction with this post.