Talk about being selective, but the Pulitzer Arts Foundation has precisely three items in its permanent collection (if you don’t count the Tadao Ando-designed building itself). One of them is Rock Settee, a five-ton stone chair that the sculptor Scott Burton (1939-1989) was working on at the end of his life. Rock Settee is situated outside of the Pulitzer, facing the reflecting pool included in Ando’s design.
Inside the Pulitzer, Burton’s show Shape Shift will be installed until February 2. You could say that his playful sense of functional sculpture has moved from the outside into the gallery for the life of this show. That fact is something the composer Christopher Stark, who curates the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Live at the Pulitzer series, was playing with in his design of Outside In, a program that seven ace SLSO musicians performed at the Pulitzer on Tuesday, January 28.
Outside In opened with 21 (2008) by Andy Akiho. This percussion-driven piece was named, not for the composer’s age at the time (though he was less than 30), but for the 21st measure of the Fugue movement in J.S. Bach’s Violin Sonata in G minor, where Akiho poached a chord sequence and some musical motives. Also, Akiho composed the piece for his cellist friend Mariel Roberts, who was 21 at the time. At the Pulitzer, Roberts’ cello bow was taken up by Yin Xiong, who also had more work to do with her feet than one expects from a cellist. With her right foot, she banged a bass drum with a pedal, and with her left foot, she cued a loop (of cello plucking and bell clanging) recorded at a rehearsal with percussionist Kevin Ritenauer. Xiong also clapped her hands, at times, something I have never seen a symphony cellist do during a performance.
Akiho being a percussionist at heart, he gave even more for Ritenauer to do, mainly on marimba, an instrument I can’t hear enough of. Ritenauer also stepped on a foot pedal to play a tambourine, which was attached (taped?) to the marimba with an improvised, small-change look unprecedented for the SLSO or Pulitzer. Throughout the 10-minute performance, Ritenauer varied mallets, attacks and tones, creating a dense flow of rhythms that matched the name (Shape Shift) of the show that inspired the program.
In eloquent prefatory remarks, Stark noted that the composer likes to play instruments typically performed outside, such as steel drums and marching drums. “This is music from the street brought into the gallery space,” Stark said.
Stark also noted the influence of the groove-based rock music that Akiho enjoys, and indeed, 21 was listenable for non-specialists to a degree uncommon in contemporary chamber music. They rocked – especially at the end. The most abrasive and disruptive musical element was Ritenauer’s banging on the marimba’s steel substructure – but then, marimba punctuated by clangs on steel just added a gritty Tom Waits vibe.
Stark introduced the middle piece of the program, all streams reach the sea at last (2011) by Elizabeth Ogonek, by connecting it to the Pulitzer’s reflecting pool that anchors Burton’s Rock Settee. The curator spoke with unpretentious eloquence about the mystery of the waters. Ogonek composed this four-part piece for two flutes, two percussionists, and piano, Stark said, while she was a student at the University of Southern California, inspired by the campus fountains. He said the piece was premiered by Timothy Munro, Stark’s predecessor curating the Live at the Pulitzer series founded by David Robertson and a virtuosic flute player.
The five SLSO players who performed all streams reach the sea at last at the Pulitzer all performed this intricate and demanding piece with intense virtuosity. We talk about “piano four hands,” so I experienced this music as flute four hands and percussion four hands backed up by piano, which was most often revealed as the percussion instrument it technically is but also plunged into low, complex chords that grounded the flutes.
The four hands on flutes were those of Andrea Kaplan and Jennifer Nitchman. In an orchestra, the flute can take on cliched associations with the pastoral. The composer, Kaplan and Nitchman showed many more things the flute can do, from primal shriek to an atmospheric fluttering that took me out to that reflecting pool. (Only in imagination; sadly, the door outside to the Rock Settee and reflecting pool was locked – I know, because I tried it 17 times.) Thinking along the lines of Outside In, if the pastoral is an outpouring, the flute work here was more an inpouring. They created a meditative space.
The four hands on percussion were those of Ritenauer and Alan Stewart. They tapped and whacked on everything but the kitchen sink – though their instruments actually did include tin cans used to store food (first deployed musically by John Cage, Stark said in a follow-up conversation). If Ogonek reminded us that the piano is in the percussion family, she also coaxed melody out of the percussionists, who took a bow to a vibraphone, cymbal and tam-tam, a kind of gong. Ogonek, Ritenauer and Stewart showed us the art of not making a racket with a bunch of percussion. Restraint is power.
The accompanist to these two sets of instruments four hands was Peter Henderson on piano. Though his piano part was written for a piece with all these other things going on, as played by Henderson it would be listenable as a solo performance. He fulfilled rhythmic obligations with things being hammered by mallets. He dropped chord bombs under the flutes. He went on fanciful narrative melodic runs that sounded like fairy tales. He played outside jazz. (Ogonek is kin in spirit to Pharoah Sanders, also a foundational composer for curator Stark.) From my perch on the second row of steps at the bottom of the Pulitzer, I could only see the pianist’s shoes and they flailed about, like a slapdash silent comedy where way too much is asked of the clown, who gets it all done anyway.
Outside In concluded with a unique and startling experience. Curating music around an art show of furniture, Stark made the connection to what was once called “furniture music” but we now associate with “wallpaper” or the more literal “background” music. Happy hour music. Music that does something practical, which is create sonic space for people to mingle. Stark offered this introduction standing at the lower level of the Pulitzer where the musicians are staged, but the musicians did not walk out from the green room after his introduction. “You can stay where you are if you want,” Stark said to the audience seated on the steps and on chairs (not Scott Burton chairs) at the top of the steps. “But the musicians are upstairs.”
A trio of players had been seated (also on not Scott Burton chairs) upstairs in the main exhibit space. Though they were cordoned off, more protected from the public than some of the art works, these three symphony musicians (Yin Xiong back on cello, Peter Henderson back but now on harmonium, and Kristin Ahlstrom on violin) were closer to view than at any SLSO show I have seen – close enough to touch.
Stark encouraged us to experience the meditative, ambient Devotions (2022) by Anthony Vine as furniture music while we strolled around and looked at Burton’s furniture as art. In fact, we just arrayed ourselves around the musicians and watched them perform. I stood as close to the music as I could without obstructing anyone else’s view or breathing on a musician, and I was transfixed by Henderson’s hand-pumping of the harmonium in concert with the string players and how he cued them in with his bellows hand.
I thought of something that Stark had said when introducing Vine’s devotional approach to composing this music, talking about the composer’s sense of the sacred. “I think of sacred spaces,” Stark said, standing at the bottom of the Pulitzer, before walking us up to the music and sculpture. “This, to me, is one of the sacred spaces in St. Louis.” Amen to that.
The closing reception for Scott Burton’s show Shape Shift will be held 5-8 p.m. Friday, January 31. Admission to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation is free.