Live at the Pulitzer – St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians performing contemporary chamber music at the Pulitzer Arts Center curated in response to the museum’s current show – sounded like a brilliant idea when David Robertson introduced it in 2002. It has been a profound pleasure to see it continue to evolve and literally never disappoint on that brilliant premise.
The new season of the series, now curated by the composer and WashU professor Christopher Stark, opened with a unique and inspired program on Tuesday, November 4. The Pulitzer’s current show is A Line When Broken Begins Again by Jennie C. Jones, who – Stark explained – is inspired in her artmaking by composers of contemporary chamber music. The fact that both visual artist and chamber music composers are African American made this collaboration truly distinctive and borderline historic.
As always with Live at the Pulitzer, a brilliant concept was fulfilled with just as much brilliance. Stark (with Jones’ consultation) curated seven musical miniatures, six of them solos, so I will report these seven performances in seven miniatures.
Bjorn Ranheim performed Carlos Simon’s Silence on what a program would have to list as unaccompanied cello, though the piece calls for such radically different approaches to playing the instrument, often at the same time, that Ranheim basically accompanied his cello on cello.
Peter Henderson performed Alvin Singleton’s In My Own Skin on solo piano. Introducing the tune, Stark namechecked Thelonius Monk and Tchaikovsky, but I thought even more powerfully of James Booker (and a St. Louis-born, New Orleans-based pianist who would burn playing this piece: Tom McDermott). If Ranheim appeared to play a second cello with himself, Henderson performed a duet with Singleton’s score, peering into the notes he was playing with the dynamic face of someone interacting with another sentient being.
Andrea Kaplan performed Carlos Simon’s Move It on solo alto flute. As Stark noted, what a rare experience to hear solo alto flute – a first, for me. Another first: Kaplan spread out her score horizontally on her music stand with four open accordion folds, then, rather than turning the pages, she just kept stepping to her right. She moved with Move It. And this music moved. Solo alto flute might present as a classical music nerd thing, but the composer I kept hearing was Michael Jackson. MJ passed 11 years before Move It was composed in 2020, and it’s a wonder he didn’t rise from his tomb.
Peter Henderson – who often draws the tough assignments at the Pulitzer – came back out to play solo piano on George Lewis’ Endless Shout. At 14 minutes it was the longest piece of the night, and the only one with more than one movement, four, calling for four separate starts and stops, four separate arcs. I heard the blues shouters implicit in the title – walking bass lines and a striding left hand – but also right-hand trills, two-handed attacks, and just about every way you could tickle the ivories.
David DeRiso performed Carlos Simon’s Between Worlds on solo double bass (you’ve got to love a good solo double). I kept hearing the vernacular musical elements underlying the think piece. Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy could have made serious fun with this music had Lester lived to hear it. DeRiso gave the night’s most vivid expression of the intimacy of seeing symphony musicians perform at the Pulitzer, so close you can see the patterns on their earrings and hear every breath they take. Without saying a word, DeRiso unmistakably took in his experience of seeing his audience rise above him on a stairway or peer down at him from an art museum, as if from a balcony. He drew admiring laughter from the crowd as we all collectively saw through his eyes how cool this all was.
Andrea Kaplan came back out with her normal flute to perform Alvin Singleton’s Argoru III. Argoru means “to play” in the Twi language, and that came across in the performance. Kaplan played flute as if for the first time, trying everything on this thing at least once to see what it all might sound like. I felt we were present at the birth of the flute.
Stark called all the players back out to close with Pauline Oliveros’ Horse Sings From Cloud, the greatest song name ever. Stark explained that Oliveros wrote a conceptual version of a musical score, written only in words with no reference to key, notes, tempo, instrumentation or length. “Sustain one or more tones or sounds until any desire to change the tones or sounds subsides,” Stark read me the score, after the show. “When there is no desire to change the tones or sounds, then change.”
Henderson shifted from piano to synthesizer, something you also don’t see every day under the hands of a symphony musician, which suited the droning approach they took to the score. Brian Eno has nothing on these guys. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra turns out to be a great ambient band. Ranheim, Henderson, Kaplan and DeRiso are leaving money on the table if they don’t start making music for yoga, meditation and my osteopath’s office. It was odd, though, in playing such an intimate piece of collective music, how they didn’t look at each other. The only musician I saw looking for eye contact was Peter Henderson, but then he can look at a piece of sheet music like it’s an irresistible new friend.
I walked out into a beautiful early November night thinking how weird it was, during an evening of the kind of music that is supposed to be difficult to listen to, how often I felt the impulse to dance – and not interpretive dance, like the Dude’s landlord in The Big Lebowski. And I thought of this very strange feeling that snatched me at the end of Alvin Singleton’s In My Own Skin. When the music ended, I didn’t want it to end, and I was almost surprised that it did. It would have felt more natural had that music continued to exist along with everything else. A Line When Broken Begins Again.
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pulitzerarts.org