LCCMF 9.28 — OurConcerts.live

NOKUTHULA NGWENYAMA (b. 1976): Miasma (2021)

Bella Hristova, violin

CLANCY NEWMAN (b. 1977): Pop-Unpopped (2016)
Trap Queen (by Fetty Wap)
Work (by Rihanna)
Uptown Funk (by Mark Ronson)

Clancy Newman, cello

R. MURRAY SCHAFER (b. 1933): Quartet No. 5, “Rosalind” (1989)

FLUX Quartet
Tom Chiu, violin
Conrad Harris, violin
Max Mandel, viola
Felix Fan, cello

Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Miasma for Solo Violin

Miasma: an obsolete term for night air that people from China, Europe and India have scapegoated as disease for millennia. Before the widespread acceptance of germ theory, healers from Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) to Hippocrates (460-377 BCE) and Tsao Yuan-fung (Sui Dynasty, 518-618) believed that bad air led to the spread of disease. “Pollution” in Greek, mythic miasma appears “as a contagious power that has an independent life of its own. Until purged by the sacrificial death of the wrongdoer, society would be infected by the catastrophe.”

Although more than a century has passed since widespread acceptance of miasmatic theory, our reaction to pandemic remains similar. Viruses continue to find their way into the lived experience, creating global loss and spurring evolution not to be felt for generations. I started writing Miasma before the brilliant married scientists Drs. Sahin and Tureci had applied mRNA technology to help the world, believing that a sung voice of Covid-19 RNA sequences could bring us closer to understanding its behavior. While this virus has tragically impacted families around the world, they do not have malice. Most successful viruses do not kill their hosts and have aided evolution since our LUCA – last universal common ancestor – with ancient viral code embedded into functions of our current DNA.

There is no set rule as to how proteins can be used in musical form.To understand how they could be transcribed, I first consulted with long-time friend and supporter Dr Chris Biggs, an oncologist with a PhD in genetics.It turns out protein music – music composed using the protein sequences in DNA or RNA - is not new.Many, including geneticists Susumu and Midori Ohno, believe "the all pervasive principle of repetitious recurrence governs not only coding sequence construction but also human endeavor in musical composition.” Ross D King and Colin Angus make a case for the audification of DNA sequences, stating that when difference notes are played together they can still be heard, whereas when different colors coexist there is an immediate blend between the two.

Clancy Newman, Pop-Unpopped

Igor Stravinsky once wrote, "My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action... The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."

I was thinking along these lines when I came up with the idea for my Pop-Unpopped project, which was this: to write a solo cello caprice every month, inspired by whatever pop song was #1 on the U.S. billboard charts on the first of that month. This would impose three rigid constraints upon me: 1) The time constraint -- I would have only one month to write the piece; 2) The choice of song -- I would have to base my piece on whatever song was #1, whether I liked it or not; and 3) The choice of instrument -- the piece had to be for solo cello, an instrument with many technical limitations.

I did the project for sixteen grueling months. There were moments of desperation beyond anything I had ever experienced before as a composer. But -- like a person shipwrecked on a desert island who is forced to become hyper-creative -- I think that my desperation led me down paths that I never would have considered in a normal, less constrained state of mind.

R. Murray Schafer, Quartet No. 5, “Rosalind”

R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933) is internationally known as not just a composer, but also a pivotal musical thinker. He was the one to coin the now-ubiquitous word “soundscape.” Before his contribution, there simply wasn’t a word to describe the acoustic environments we live in.

Schafer has called himself “the father of acoustic ecology,” as his writings and music are deeply concerned with the damaging effects of technological sounds on human ears. Schafer has lobbied for anti-noise legislation and the improvement of urban soundscapes. He is also well known as a music educator, especially for introducing Cageian “creative hearing” concepts to classrooms.

Schafer’s compositional output transposes his concern for others into music that considers everything from incarceration to totalitarianism and – perhaps most of all – the beauty and preservation of the natural world. A number of Schafer’s works are built on the concept of “soundscape.” For example, his second string quartet (“Waves”) derives its rhythmic structure from the intervals at which ocean waves crest.

Quartets are an important subset of Schafer’s output. He has written thirteen to date, the most recent of which he composed in 2015. These are stylistically diverse works, but all share Schafer’s penchant for bringing together avant-garde techniques with an expressive, even Romantic spirit. His String Quartet No. 5 (“Rosalind”) was commissioned in 1989 by a businessman who wanted to honor his wife’s birthday. Presumably, the businessman’s wife is the titular “Rosalind.”

This composition won the 1991 Juno Award as Canada’s best classical composition, and it’s not hard to hear why. This 17-minute, through-composed work invests in modernist techniques: you’ll hear wide leaps, striking glissandi, and dissonant microtonal chords. These are then seamlessly integrated into a language that is colorful and highly expressive in a more familiar fashion, embracing the sounds of total unisons, driving rhythms, and gorgeous consonances.

The action of the fifth quartet unfolds as a vivid parade of original ideas. It is built of a series of variations and recombinations of several central motivic characters. Its dynamic motivic action eventually flows toward a place of undeniable beauty. At the apotheosis of the work, fragile harmonics frame a delicate interplay between unexpected consonant harmonies. Then, Schafer reveals the work’s most unconventional feature: two crotales, small metal percussion instruments, are struck and bowed by the violist. These resonate with the most stable of two note intervals, a perfect fifth. Their unusual resonance persists as the work’s central motives return. High, delicate sounds both tame and transform the wild motives from the opening of the piece as a final, delicate soundscape gently fades away.