Live at the Pulitzer – the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra series that turned 20 this season – challenges its curator to program new chamber works around the art on exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. For the April 9 concert that closed the 20th season, the art on display was Delcy Morelos: Interwoven, which opened a month before. For this concert, there was no getting around the visual art – literally. To get to the music, you had to skirt a labyrinth made from more than three tons of soil sourced from St. Louis that Morelos created for the exhibit.
There was no getting around Morelos’ work for the curator, either. “I was so inspired by the work in this exhibition,” said Christopher Stark, the St. Louis-based composer on faculty at Washington University who curated his first Live at the Pulitzer series this season.
Morelos works with basic materials and makes bold statements – turning a museum gallery into a labyrinth of mud, seasoned with cinnamon and clove, strikes me as bold. The artist is Colombian and continues to make Bogotá her home. Stark responded to her striking work by curating a program of earthy, bold music, all by living composers, drawn from all over the Americas.
Stark opened the show in native North America (a perspective from which, as Leslie Marmon Silko showed us in Almanac of the Dead, our current national boundaries are the provisional results of wars, crimes and war crimes). Raven Chacon, a Diné man born in 1977, was the first native composer to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022 for Voiceless Mass. Stark programmed an earlier work by Chacon, The Journey of the Horizontal People; it’s nice, at a classical concert, when a piece composed in 2015 qualifies as “earlier work.”
Stark introduced Chacon’s piece by saying it “challenges the notion of what music is or can be,” which serves as an apt prelude for hearing any new music. Chacon compelled the musicians – a nimble string quartet comprised of Erin Schreiber and Shawn Weil on violin, Shannon Williams on viola and Bjorn Ranheim on cello – to play around with the textures of their strings and bow hairs to make what sounded more often like sound effects than conventional music. I heard a glass harmonica – not easily conjured on strings! – the ascending roars of sirens, and the sounds of music failing. This was not the sound of musicians failing, but rather the sound of musicians expertly performing the sounds of music failing. “No instruments were harmed in that performance,” Stark quipped when the musicians fell silent.
Stark introduced the next piece, Mariel by the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, by referencing the aromatic spices embedded in Morelos’ sculptures, which perfumed the performance space. Stark said he wanted to “fill the museum with these sounds” the way the sculptures filled it with smells, and he cited the way that sound, like smell, “unlocks memories.” For the composer, they were memories of a departed friend, Mariel Stubrin. “I attempted to capture that short instant before grief, in which one learns of the sudden death of a friend who was full of life: a single moment frozen forever in one’s memory,” Golijov wrote.
Golijov composed his memorial portrait as a duet between marimba (Alan Stewart) and cello (Ranheim). I was struck by the deft variations in rhythm versus melody between the two instruments: the marimba held down a repeating pattern while the cello erupted in plaintive melody, then the cello played a droning pattern while the marimba sang lead. I also enjoyed the unusually clear view of an SLSO percussionist performing – these guys are usually rushing around between their various, hulking instruments at the far back of the concert stage.
In Molly Herron’s Three Sarabandes, the music started to move out of the head and into the body. Stark explained that the sarabande was first a dance form in Panama – so raucous that it was once banned in Spain. By the end of the third movement, Williams was dancing with her viola, though Herron thought her way to dance through that challenging “what music is or can be” thing. As the musicians plucked their strings in strange ways and slapped them with their bows and played on their instruments’ bridges (which sounded like rushing surf and wind), it occurred to me that masterful musicians are much better at making disturbed sounds than an untutored person messing around on an instrument. There is an art to making noise – or, at least, these musical noises.
Melody and dance flourished with less inhibition from new-musical motives in Clarice Assad’s Canções da America (2021), which closed this inventive and exciting program. Stark’s trans-American vision came full circle here. While Golijov, from the birthplace of tango, remembered his friend with the Brazilian music Mariel loved, Assad, a Brazilian, busted out a tango in the middle of her celebration of Latin song. After a night of technical finesse and what seemed at times to be a strategic resistance to playing a fully voiced note, Assad warmed the Pulitzer with dynamic melodic interplay – she took these stellar players on four melodic adventures with occasional points of contact and crashes to a close.
Schreiber and Williams danced with their instruments in their seats. I learned the hard way that you can’t really dance in your seat if it’s made out of concrete like the steps at the Pulitzer where I was sitting to watch this show. So, I got up and walked around Morelos’ earthen labyrinth. I let the music permeate me as I breathed in the spices Morelos had mixed with St. Louis soil. I thought of something Stark had said: “Sound waves exist forever; they just keep floating further away.” I liked the idea – the fact – of being there, then, so close to those sounds, then, so close to that art, there, so close to that orphaned earth, even as it all was dissolving and going away.
Delcy Morelos: Interwoven, closes August 4. Visit https://pulitzerarts.org.
