The challenge of curating Live at the Pulitzer for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is to program music – for the 20 years the series has been in existence, it’s been mostly edgy contemporary chamber music – around the current exhibits and permanent collection of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. On Tuesday, January 30, Christopher Stark, in his first season curating the series, responded to the current exhibit Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis by reminding St. Louis of one of its most important Black composers – Olly Wilson (1937-2018) – and doing his best to make sure Wilson’s work doesn’t get lost.
Wilson’s Echoes (1974) was the longest and penultimate composition on a challenging but rewarding five-piece program. Wilson composed it for clarinet and electronic tape (produced at the University of California, Berkeley, Electronic Music Studio). Tzuygin Huang, bass clarinetist for SLSO, played clarinet slightly amplified in duet with Wilson’s tape from Berkeley. Before she cued the tape operator, Huang moved back some chairs and music stands – she knew she would need some room to move. She paced, shifted in place, doubled over, and danced as she played the live clarinet side of Wilson’s Echoes. His writing for the performances on the electronic tape included a wide range of sound-makers that were recorded with remarkable depths of space, and Huang had nothing but one clarinet to work with, but she maintained a meditative emotional center even when she wailed. Certainly, she wailed!
Live at the Pulitzer always sells out to a discerning and adoring audience, but the round of applause for Huang and Wilson went on a long time, finally calling her back from the green room to take another bow. Stark noted that the composer would appreciate the love, and I appreciate Stark for keeping in memory and repertoire a Black St. Louis modern composer whom one does not hear much about.
Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis also was Stark’s hook for curating another Black composer, Allison Loggins-Hull (born in 1982). St. Louis is not her home – she grew up in Chicago, is the composer in residence for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra and lives in New Jersey – but Stark thought her solo flute composition Homeland (2018) speaks to the complex feelings about home and place conjured by Urban Archaeology (a collaboration between the Pulitzer and the National Building Arts Center in Sauget).
Andrea Kaplan, associate principal flute for SLSO, got the nod to perform Homeland. If playing a duet live with a recording of a bunch of creative sound-makers recorded expertly in Berkeley during a heyday for experimental music is one challenge, then looking up the steps at the Pulitzer and pulling this much heart out of your flute unaccompanied is another. As with Huang’s private dancing with her clarinet, the physicality of Kaplan’s performance was laid bare in this intimate space. We could hear the breaths she needed to draw to outpour all this music. I noticed one particularly intense roll of her eyes as she worked something out. Much of Homeland sounds like getting something out of your system, yet it’s also a soaring and celebratory composition based in love, and Kaplan was feeling and spreading the love.
Between Loggins-Hull and Wilson, in the heart of the program, Stark (born in 1980) curated his own composition, Maple (2018). Given that it was inspired by his homeland of Montana – specifically, watching wildfires devour Montana from his adopted home of St. Louis – Maple fits well between Homeland and a hometown composer, but Stark situated his piece in the context of an upcoming film and video exhibition, On Earth, which opens at the Pulitzer on March 8.
Stark wrote Maple for clarinet (Huang), violin (Andrea Jarrett), cello (Bjorn Ranheim), piano (Peter Henderson) and his own recorded sound collage that mixes field recordings of Montana wildfires with electronica elements pitched to the familiar and down-budget – while Montana burns, its native son tries to cheer himself up with chintzy drum machine sounds. From the acoustic instruments we heard played live, we get a little bit of everything: elegy, mindscape, intricate chamber quartet interplay, frenetic jamming. For a daring and daunting composition, Maple is remarkably tuneful. It weeps, it sings, it rollicks, it rocks. The recorded sound collage survives all of these changes as, in essence, a fifth player, but a fifth player the other players can’t see or cue, and the tightness of the starts and stops between live players and recorded sound inspired awe.
Before and after all that, the program opened with Riis (1996) by Laurence Crane (born in 1961) and ended with live in static (2019) by Cassie Wieland (born in 1994). Stark programmed Crane around the other current exhibition, Sarah Crowner: Around Orange. Crowner’s paintings do not engage me as much as Urban Archaeology, and to my ears Riis is one of those contemporary pieces where it sounds like something is broken, and not in a cool way like it’s disrupted. It’s like a key got stuck or the CD player is broken – and why make a cello sound like a dental drill?
On the other hand altogether, live in static could make new friends for adventurous contemporary music. Wieland writes for clarinet, violin, cello and piano (Huang, Jarrett, Ranheim and Henderson, again), asking for idiosyncratic but carefully orchestrated attacks on the various instruments: it’s chamber music for plucking, droning, plunking and tapping, but all together and with bursts of melody and rhythm that come as a surprise emerging from all this tickling and tinkling.
Wieland conceived of this music in collaboration with the video artist Xuan, whose work was projected on a wall at the Pulitzer. Xuan shot a travelogue streetscape, often at night, often looking up at streetlights, so that the dance of the streetlights tells much of the story. The lights appear against rectangles of dark sky and the visual static of the title, which looks blue. The Ellsworth Kelly painting Blue Black that dominates the Pulitzer’s small but mighty permanent collection was in our field of vision to the right. That was a powerful interplay of images to close an intense evening of experiencing music chosen so that visual art could hear it.
Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis and Sarah Crowner: Around Orange close this weekend. Visit pulitzerarts.org. For Live at the Pulitzer, visit slso.org.
