Into the Dazzling Air

Herringbone is the one who set the light bulb off for me, when he wrote about Maxwell McKee’s Double Quintet:  “Double Quintet seemed to have a noticeable beat that you could groove too.  I could see Roger Daltrey grabbing the mike and belting something out.”

I turned to my mate (who knows about these things), and said, “Who’s Roger Daltrey?”  “The Who,” came the reply, with that don’t-you-know-anything-about-music look, “Tommy.”  “Ah,” I said.  (OK, even I remember Tommy. It’s an opera, after all.  It even has an overture.)

That’s when it dawned on me:  Contemporaneous is my favorite rock band.

I’ll never forget my first concert.  I’d taken a flyer on it; I had no idea who they were.  The date was November 14, 2010, the place was the Hudson Opera House.  I took my Flip cam along to make what the cognoscenti call a bootleg, if I could.

Just like any rock aficionado worth her salt, I held up that Flip cam for seventeen minutes straight to snag a piece.  All right, a little different, because it was music by a composer I’d never heard of.  The composer’s name was Jesse Alexander Brown, and the piece was Through the Motions.

There were a lot of firsts for me that night:  I’d never seen three vibes-type instruments used in a single piece of music.  Two young men hopped back and forth between them, and this great band played this fantastic music as a fellow named Josh Tanner knocked us flat with his fabulous flute.

I’m glad I held up my Flip cam, because I love reliving that first discovery. That’s the thing about Contemporaneous:  they play a whole lot of brand new music, and not only that, but they commission music, which means you get to hear music the very first time it’s ever played.  Music that, as Dylan Mattingly said, “. . . you have no idea what it’s going to be.  Nothing has proved it not the best thing in the world.”

But here’s the thing about commissions.  Rob Wendt, in his excellent review of an Arvo Pärt CD, wrote that, unlike for Pärt, “There are many contemporary composers who receive coveted commissions, only to see their creations shelved after one performance.”  OK, maybe not everything can make it to a longer life, but a lot more should than does.

Bootlegs aren’t the answer (even though Contemporaneous has so far welcomed mine, properly credited, to be sure).  For one, this music deserves better than shaky hand-held video with its less-than-stellar audio.  I felt lucky to find audio of at least some of the music on the web.  That’s where I listened to Mattingly’s music for the first time, and what I heard made me hell bent on getting to Contemporaneous performances of his work.

For one, we’d seen Mattingly at a student recital. He’d pulled out this huge score from his Contemporaneous tote bag and told us about his newest piece.  I’d never seen a score up close, and this one was a gorgeous objet d’art.  The score Mattingly showed me was for his magnum opus to date, Atlas of Somewhere on the Way to Howland Island.  There was no way we were missing that premiere.

I took my Flip cam to that, too, and caught what I could with its fading battery power.  When Contemporaneous reprised Atlas up at Bard in what turned out to be the start of the October snowstorm debacle, we made that concert, too.

Then I learned Contemporaneous was planning on making a CD.  Of Mattingly’s music. Including Atlas and two pieces I’d missed hearing live.  One hundred people contributed to the effort, and thanks to that, I now have a copy of the CD, Stream of Stars, in my hands.

Though Atlas appears first in the CD line-up, I’ll write about it last.

Six Night Sunrise (Music of Barges and Metallic Stars)
-for violin and piano

Sabrina Tabby (violin) and Mayumi Tsuchida (piano) have this music deep in their bones.  They give voice to its bluesy pulse, its dreaming and hesitations, with the ease of intimate conversation.

A crush of piano notes and a violin’s rocking plaint evoke the lumbering dignity of a barge on dark water.  We’re on the barge, looking up, or perhaps we’re on a bridge, watching the barge approach from below.  We’re wherever the music takes us, wherever we want to go, sauntering along, hands in our pockets, dancing, drifting, stopping now and then to look as the barge moves past.  Or we might be on the barge, staring idly at its moonlit wake, bright pricks of stars above us, until called to resume work’s rhythms of muscle and sweat.

The music stops, and the piano slips into silence on quietly lapping chords.  The violin soars to a last great height, the piano spills notes into a final chord, and the barge moves off, disappearing in the dark.

Lighthouse (Refugee Music by a Pacific Expatriate)
-for amplified string quintet

Leave-taking is palpable from the music’s first wrenching wail.  The lighthouse beacon beckons, cutting through fog and night, yet the movement of the music is away, not toward the light.  Pierced by plaintive notes, the music, haltingly but inexorably, lets go of a landscape known and loved.

With metallic sparks and struggle, the music gains density and momentum, becomes a train speeding down a track.  The lighthouse is no longer visible, yet the first violin lays claim to it still:  I’m holding on to the place you’ve torn me from, it tells us, no matter where you take me now.  The train speeds on.  The passenger stares out the window, but there’s nothing left to see.  The violins and contrabass go silent, and the cello and viola bring the music to a wistful close.

The quintet’s poignant performance, by Alex Fager and Finnegan Shanahan (violins), Josh Henderson (viola), Mattingly (cello), and Zachary Israel (contrabass) with the remarkable David Bloom conducting, comes from deep inside this music and speaks its language with agility and power.
       
Atlas of Somewhere on the Way to Howland Island
-for chamber orchestra

Mattingly’s music is the air Contemporaneous breathes.  Every note, every phrase, every shift in mood and meaning is fully felt and communicated. The performances on this fine CD bring Mattingly’s visionary magic to vivid life, and the pinnacle of that achievement is in Atlas.

From a Wikipedia entry about Amelia Earhart’s doomed globe-circling flight, Mattingly, in Atlas, has created a musical tour de force.  Here’s Mattingly on the subject the night of its premiere performance:



As Atlas opens, chords charge the air in exuberant bursts.  The music’s engine stutters to life and begins its steep ascent, piercing through clouds and climbing toward the sun.  A toy piano scatters celestial phosphorescence; a quarter-tone harp issues spectral sound.  A piano settles into a jazzy groove, accompanied by the contrabass.  The music reaches altitude and glides in space.

Grand and subtle changes limn a journey in all its phases:  exuberant, pensive, watchful, and lyrical, in turns.  The harp signals a shift from day to night; a piano shivers in the nighttime air.  The winds dance along plucked strings; a trumpet heralds dawn.  Voices sing low “ahs,” buoying a violin into graceful flight.

Mattingly knows when to let silence speak. The piano fades into silence, the music resumes on quiet chords, and a violin emerges in lyrical lament.  We realize Earhart has vanished, yet the music refuses to sit in sorrow.  The harpsichord strews stars across the air.  The music rebuilds momentum, only to have silence overtake it once again.

The violin re-enters, and the Elegy begins.  The violin and a clarinet lift and fall, a poignant phrase echoed by the oboe and cello in turns.  The music, though, will not submit to the dying of the light.  In its final section, Starship, it rises to ecstatic heights and catapults a last, great chord into the dazzling air.

When I listen to Mattingly’s music, I'm in the company of Harry Partch and Big Bill Broonzy, of Joni Mitchell, Lou Harrison, Bob Dylan, and John Adams—of Miles Davis and Woody Guthrie—of the great composers and musicians who make up America’s musical vernacular   But Mattingly doesn’t rest on those traditions, for he, too, is an explorer.  He stands on their shoulders and peers out to create a music as vital as it is new.

As for Atlas, though we can’t yet know what history will make of it, I hold fast to what I wrote before.  Dylan Mattingly, young as he is, has, with Atlas, earned his place in the pantheon of contemporary American composers.

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Here’s an excerpt from Atlas, the two final sections (Elegy and Starship), as performed by Contemporaneous at the world premiere on September 24, 2011. The composer was in the audience that night (as were his parents, who’d flown out from California and who’d never heard Contemporaneous live before).  It’s all captured on a bootleg, as any dedicated fan must do on such a historic night.



One more thing.  I’m also the exceedingly proud owner of an autographed copy of the score.

History, get ready.  I’m certainly ready for you.

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More History In The Making

On April 11, 2012, Contemporaneous will open the 2012 Tribeca New Music Festival with a performance of Mattingly’s Atlas of Somewhere on the Way to Howland Island.  Also featured on the program will be 23-year-old composer William Zuckerman's ensemble Symphony Z, playing his new work, Music In Pluralism.

Both ensembles will be conducted by the indomitable David Bloom.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012
8:00 PM
Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center
129 West 67th Street
New York, New York

The concert will be the official CD release event for Stream of Stars, as well as William Zuckerman's Music in Pluralism.

For more information about the concert, click here.  For more information on the Stream of Stars CD and digital release, click here.

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Names of some of the musicians of Contemporaneous can be connected with faces here.  Contemporaneous musicians performing Atlas on the CD are David Bloom (conductor), Fanya Wyrick-Flax (flute), Alex Meyer (oboe), Amalie Wyrick-Flax (clarinet), Renata Rakova (bass clarinet), David Adam Nagy (bassoon and contrabassoon), James Haber (horn), Christopher Carroll (trumpet), Václav Kalivoda (trombone), Amy Garapic (marimba), Ronald Joseph (toy piano and percussion), Tamzin Ferré Elliot (quarter-tone harp and percussion), Mayumi Tsuchida (piano and harsichord), Maxwell McKee (harpsichord and toy piano), Sabrina Tabby, Finnegan Shanahan, Max Scheinin, and Caitlin Majewski (violins), Maryam Parhizkar and Anna Hadfield (violas), Katharine Dooley and Gabriella Spitz (cellos), and Bingwen Yang (contrabass).

Credits:  The image at the head of the post is my photograph of my copy of the Atlas score, my program from the premiere, and a fortune cookie message.  The image of the score on its own is also my photograph of my copy of the score.  The image of the fundraising results can be found here. The image of the Stream of Stars CD cover (designed by George Mattingly Design, who also designed the covers for the Atlas score), can be found here. The quotations from Herringbone and Mattingly can be found here.  The quotation from Rob Wendt's review at I Care If You Listen can be found here.