Big rewards in composing by collective
More than two decades ago, the Common Sense Composers Collective, a loose-knit gaggle of eight musicians spread across the U.S. and Canada, hit upon an ingenious creative strategy. They find a performing ensemble with a suitably adventurous spirit and round up some commissioning money, and then everyone writes a piece for the same forces.
Boom — an instant, full-length program suitable for concert performance or recording, with a range of music that all seems to emanate from a shared esthetic. It’s an offer that’s hard to beat.
The latest group to partner with Common Sense is the Friction String Quartet, the dynamic young San Francisco ensemble whose combination of energy and knowing irony provides a fitting vehicle for these compositional voices. The results, on display in a terse but invigorating concert on Wednesday, March 15, at the Center for New Music, made a potent case for the benefits of this kind of collaboration.
In large part, that was because the quartet — violinists Kevin Rogers and Otis Harriel, violist Taija Warbelow and cellist Doug Machiz — seemed so attuned to the sensibilities of the composers being represented. Many of the shared assumptions that underlie the inevitable differences in their artistic personalities — including a commitment to expressive clarity, rhythmic vitality and plain-spoken musical language — found a counterpart in the ensemble’s vibrant playing style.
At the same time, the pitfalls of this arrangement came through just as plainly — above all, the fact that eight composers is, well, a lot of composers. Getting everyone into the act in the course of a concert running at even less than the traditional two hours meant making sure that each piece said what it had to say as quickly as possible before being shooed offstage.
Nearly every piece on the program clocked in somewhere between five and 10 minutes, and even at that, you could almost imagine the Oscar night orchestra playing one or two of the composers off in mid-thought.
But if the program felt more like a tasting menu than a full-fledged musical meal, the dishes on offer were all succulent and varied, ranging from tender lyricism to full-on dance explosions.
Rhapsodic expressivity was the province of Belinda Reynolds’ “Open,” which strung together moody minor harmonies in phrases of appealingly unpredictable lengths, and Marc Mellits’ “Tapas: Five,” which was short, pulsing and unabashedly lovely.
At the other end of the spectrum was Randall Woolf ’s “No Luck, No Happiness,” which superimposed gritty unison lines from the quartet’s playing on a funky prerecorded rhythm track, as if Beethoven had taken a temp job as James Brown’s arranger. John Halle’s “Sphere[’]s” created an exuberantly jerry-built structure out of two Thelonious Monk tunes (“Straight No Chaser” and another one) played with different speeds and rhythmic profiles.
Melissa Hui, in the five short movements of “Map of Reality,” doubled down on the evening’s patchwork theme by backing up and coming at similar material from different angles, while the two movements of Carolyn Yarnell’s “Hiko” set up, then explored, a meditation on pizzicato versus bowed textures. Ed Harsh’s “Trill” began tautly on point, but seemed to get distracted at midstream.
The evening’s final and most conspicuously focused work was “Lockdown” by Dan Becker (who had also curated the program). The piece layers short sustained melodies and aggressive bursts of musical punctuation atop a fervent rhythmic pattern, patiently works through its foundational ideas, and glides to an elegantly proportioned stop. Sweet!