A contemporary composer’s take on the age-old question of what it means to exist in time.
In late February, I joined fellow students and community members in the dimly lit Luth auditorium. Immediately more interesting than our usual pre-concert rituals – perusing the program, scrolling through our phones, chatting with the people around us, watching the others file in – was the thing in the center of the stage. In place of a typical musical setup stood a piano facing away from the audience, and next to it, a set of keyboards, some tables, and a tea-colored wooden contraption covered in colorful wires and cords connected to a circuit board.
Under pressure to evolve and produce fresh or nontraditional experiences, classical concert halls have increasingly sought to broaden their offerings beyond Beethoven and Schubert, literally making space for instrumentalists like Jeremy Flower, multi-instrumentalist and electroacoustic composer, to take the stage. Flower’s A Series of Resolutions, commissioned by Prior Composer-In-Residence Osvaldo Golijov for string quartet and electronics, ideally represents this growing symbiosis and the emergence of a more expansive inclusion of artistic works. Across his work, Flower’s music focuses on the comingling of acoustic and electronic sound, manipulating a fundamental and distinguishing facet of music performance: its reliance on and unique control over time. A Series of Resolutions is no exception.
To be sure, the work is, in many ways, still quite traditional in style. The central melodies are manipulated and interwoven; the counterpoint is straightforward and generally tonal. However, Flower’s use of electronics elevates this piece to something far beyond the standard fare of yet another string quartet. The inclusion of this new way of producing sound is subtle – an extension of a note, a repeated figure in the background of the strings’ melody – highlighting and building upon the existing fabric of the music, rather than adding new layers.
Flower’s premiere at The Prior is, in itself, an efficacious tie to his music and his work. Flower’s compositions, which transcend the barriers of new and old traditions, uniquely parallel the mission of The Prior to incorporate all the arts into a single shared practice. Indeed, Flower’s performance and work alongside Osvaldo Golijov, mirror this blurring of boundaries within a single medium.
Although the incorporation of electronic elements or fully synthesized music into the concert hall has been a slow process, spanning decades, there remains a level of mysticism around its use in classical music that has yet to be fully resolved. Experienced listeners often equate electronics or synthesized media in music with composers like Steve Reich (famous for his cut-tape pieces), Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Milton Babbitt, all of which challenged the musical status quo in extreme ways. Nevertheless, electronic media has found more subtle strongholds in more traditional iterations of classical music as well. Philip Glass, best known for his minimalist piano works, also incorporated electronic elements, including electric organ, into his later operas and film scores.
This melding of the new and the old, however exciting, does not come without its share of challenges and questions for the future. With the emergence of “tech” in the concert hall comes a necessary question: where do we go from here? Music like Flower’s is written, and often even performed, within a specific set of technical conditions and practices – venues, instruments, and softwares – that make it possible. As technology and even performance spaces themselves evolve and change, it is worth asking how music like Flower’s can stand the test of time to be performed again, ultimately finding a place within the performance canon. With the growing reliance on specific sounds, composers are faced with unique restrictions that vary by venue. And as time moves away from the inception of their works, the original technology with which it was first performed may no longer be available. Philip Glass notoriously struggled to reproduce the sounds he first created when re-performing Einstein on the Beach, since the electric organ/synthesizers he used had changed, altering the sound of the ensemble. That Flower will face a similar challenge is all but assured Certainly, every performance of even traditional works are necessarily recreations and reinterpretations. The new and important factor here, as exemplified by Glass’ struggle, is the accelerated pace at which these changes are now taking place, opening up new possibilities for modifications, collaboration, and an ever-expanding ownership of a composer’s work.
The Luth took on a different quality for Flower’s concert than it had before when hosting orchestras, choirs, soloists, and even thespians. The back-lit stage and clear juxtaposition of the Steinway grand – a familiar prize jewel of the center – alongside Flower’s unfamiliar personal equipment gave the space a liminal, temporal feel, preparing the listeners to join the artist on a journey through time in A Series of Resolutions. For a moment, time was on the one hand suspended, where melody and rhythm alongside synthesizers and speakers created a sonic world not quite bound by the standard physical capacities of the instruments and the space. On the other hand, the performance was locked in time even more strictly than standard fare performances of Beethoven or Shubert, being restricted not only to this performance, but also to this space, these performers, and that set of technology and software.
Flower’s work makes no claim to definitive answers, but his work certainly opens the door – both literally and figuratively – to begin exploring the complex relationship between time and music. As Golijov wrote in his program note, “We all know the feeling of hearing music that sounds like ineffable longing, or music that sounds like the ineffable joy at being alive, or prayer, or majestic sea waves, or the future. Jeremy Flower’s music deletes all the “or(s)” in the sentence above […] Because music is music: it all can happen at the same time, as in life!” Attendees of A Series of Resolutions can be assured that they experienced something quite special that night, participating in their own right in a performance both transcendent and highly imminent. Raising our eyes from a long history of strict adherence to a narrow performance canon, familiar interpretative guidelines, and a limited number of performers intended to produce “timeless” music, Flower’s reinterpretation of time, space, and sound is exactly what the modern concert hall needs on their calendar.