New York Classical Review

There is a festival within this year’s annual Time:Spans. One of the finest new music festivals in existence, and one of the most extensive, the current several nights of concerts have a focus on composers and ensembles from Canada. These concerts are produced by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust, with additional assistance from Canadian, and Québecoise, institutions and governments.

Friday night in the DiMenna Center, the great Bozzini Quartet from Montréal was the headliner, and the program was brand new music from three Canadian composers. Commissioned by multiple sources, including the Brown Foundation, the Bozzini Quartet, and the Canadian Council for the Arts, there were world premieres from Taylor Brook and Zosha Di Castri, and a New York premiere of a piece from Cassandra Miller that was still so new it did not have a title printed in the program book.

The Bozzini Quartet is in a similar and complementary place in classical music as JACK Quartet in the U.S. They have a fine warm, almost old-school sound that is a pleasure to hear applied to cutting edge musical ideas. Friday’s music, though new, was right in the mainstream of contemporary classical composition. It explored conceptual art and non-standard ideas of form, with only a few hints of extended and avant-garde techniques. There were many lovely sounds, but not always sufficient ideas to support them.

Brooks’ Vinetan Songs was high-concept. In his program notes (Time:Spans programs are lovely paperback books), Brooks explained the work’s origins in the myth of the sunken Baltic city of Vinetan. His idea was to imagine the place’s musical traditions, and write music that expressed them.

The narrative-driven music turned out to be too literary. Given the chance to imagine a musical culture from scratch, Brook adapted ideas from other traditions. Some were inventively applied, others weren’t. Some vocalized, microtonal music from Sardinian folk music was involving, a fragment of Scheherezade was puzzling, There was a Medieval lullaby, music with a dance feeling, more that was mournful, and in the end a section that seemed like an argument between melodic and harmonic structure that had an ambivalent resolution.

Each musical idea was solid in itself, except for the last, but none lived up to the overall concept. Given the opportunity to imagine entirely new musical traditions, Brook came up with things that were familiar, nothing that answered his own questions about the social purpose of the music, and even how instruments might be played.

Di Castri’s Delve began with a marvelous, skeletal feeling of mortality, like late Shostakovich string quartets. There were slow, thin lines with the feeling of descending night, with equally thin but much brighter lines emerging out of this mist. These were doubled by whistling from some of the musicians, and this was one of the more remarkable and uncannily beautiful things one has heard in quite a while.

This idea was so attractive and fascinating alone that it could have worked for an extended duration, but the piece moved to another section, a sawing, four-four passage that was stiff and uncomfortably awkward. The spell was broken, and, worse, the music didn’t make it clear why there had to be another section. There was an expressive contrast, but also a contrast between unconventional and conventional thinking, the latter brute force that demolished the romance of the former. What felt like an extended coda brought back the first idea, but again alternated it with prosaic, conventional music.

The New York York premiere was Cassandra Miller’s Three Songs, titled so recently that it was announced before the performance. The three songs were subtitled “Ange,” “Claire,” and “Bella” after friends of Miller’s who provided ideas about the material for the piece. The composer asked them about music they knew and loved, especially songs they knew as children or sang to their own kids.

The result was three elegant, gorgeous lullabies, with deceptive simplicity that revealed expressive and formal depths. This was clear, cogent musical thinking—it felt like Miller had taken a good hard look at her writing and made sure it said exactly what she intended—played with gentleness and emotional clarity by the quartet. Everything captured a comforting mood, and there was plenty of passion and focus inside. “Ange” and “Claire” had fragments of the original material that one could almost recognize, but Miller’s transformation of this into her own voice was subtle, skillful, and complete.

“Bella” was the most rigorous bit of technique. Nothing more than a three-pitch phrase, descending, then repeating, the pace was slow, strings placed out of sync so that they made shifting layers. Miller used augmentation to gradually stretch out the phrase and the pace. This was immersive to hear, and gradually one realized that is was a version of the idea of Steve Reich’s Four Organs, the simplest musical material gradually stretching out through time, playing with time, disappointing only because it had to stop.

Sixtrum Percussion plays music by Eric Champagne, Jennifer Higdon, Jordan Nobles, Steve Reich, and Balinese Ceremonial Music, 7:30 p.m, at the DiMenna Center. The Time:Spans festival continues through August 23 timespans.org