Present Music’s Thanksgiving
Opening Song as performed by the Bucks Native American Singing and Drumming Group, which opened Present Music’s Thanksgiving show. All photos by Brian Jacobson.
That fifth/tonic combination calls to mind the chant and organum of Western music circa 800 A.D. High-art music history since filled in every interval in between, until dissonance became the norm and those pure fifths were suspect. Lately, since Minimalism, they’re back in favor and were everywhere on this program.
Composer Alexandra Du Bois, in attendance at the Sunday premiere of her new work.
Du Bois, perhaps inadvertantly, distilled that historical process in her new piece for the Milwaukee Choral Artists, the Milwaukee Children’s Choir and six instruments. Harmonies gradually became more complex and culminated in ringing clusters, which then gradually dispersed. In a grand, satisfying pattern of calm, rising tension and release, In Beauty, May I Walk, glides to a close on placid open fourths, the equally pure inversion of the perfect fifths.
In Beauty, dissonance does not equal ugliness. Du Bois voiced and colored her clusters, and the women of the MCA tuned them, not to clash but to shimmer golden and glorious. Conductor Sharon Hansen undertsood the music exactly and drew a skilled, ardent reading from her singers and players.
The text, fragments from a Navajo prayer promoting awareness of the beauty around us, is not intelligible, but that made no difference. The syllables and sibilants were part of the unbroken sonic beauty.
Du Bois showed kinship with Arvo Part, represented by three works on this program. He, too, can mesmerize with the simplest musical devices. The simplest of all came in his Estonian Lullaby, a turning over and over of a brief setting of three words: hush hush, baby. Indra Brusubardis and young Larissa Clopton sang it with utter simplicity and thus made it endlessly touching.
Every work on this program demonstrated awareness of history and tradition, and not just music history. Frode Fjellheim’s Psalm refers not to Biblical poetry but to a form of music practiced by his Norwegian ethnic subculture, rethought into a sophisticated piece for women’s choir, piano and — surprise — soprano saxophone.
The fire-alarm intensity, at one extreme, and hushed contemplation, on the other, in Osvaldo Golijov’s Yiddishbbuk rises from the composer’s identification with victims of the holocaust and from his fascination with a fragementary mystic text. Violinists Eric Segnitz and Naha Greenholtz, violist Brek Renzelman and cellist Adrien Zitoun made it sound as hot as a branding iron and as serene as a Zen garden.
Organist Karen Beaumont brought out the epic dignity in the conclusion of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha and the epic perversity in Peter Maxwell Davies’ Psalm 124. An old chorale, played low and registered so as to sound lugubrious, drones on endlessly, even as a second tune — highy, nasal and utterly unrelated — enters and wanders about like an ant exploring a loaf of moldy bready.
The most historically rooted of all were the Bucks Native American Singing and Drumming Group, an irreplaceable part of Present Music’s Thanksgiving tradition. Their hair-raising singing and the deep sound of their great communal drum spoke to something ancient and essential in all of us.
Click here to read an interview, with links to sound samples, with Alexandra du Bois.
Coming soon to TCD: Brian Jacobson’s photo slide show, with musical samples from the concert.
Wow, Tom–that was fast. I just got home from singing this concert.
That’s what I do, Barbara.
And Brian Jacobson: sensational pictures! Thanks for adding them so quickly. What a package. TCD rules. — Tom
Thank you.