A celebration of composer Oliveros
“Don’t worry about building a career,” the late composer and musical thinker Pauline Oliveros used to say. “Build a community.”
The percussionist and conductor Steven Schick cited this aphorism on Friday, March 23, at the beginning of a delightful hour-long stretch of music either written or inspired by Oliveros. That in turn was part of a two-night, four-part extravaganza of new work, presented at Z Space by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players to celebrate both Oliveros and Schick, who is stepping down after seven fruitful years as the group’s artistic director.
The invocation of communal endeavor seemed particularly apt on both fronts. Oliveros, who died in 2016 at 84, had a knack for bringing musicians together — composers, performers, listeners — in ways that simultaneously challenged their thinking and confirmed their shared humanity. And Schick’s inventive but short-lived tenure with the Players has only reinforced the organization’s spirit of adventure across a wide range of musical undertakings.
To witness both strains in action, one only had to attend willingly to the twin performances of Oliveros’
1980 improvisatory work “The Witness,” which framed the second of Friday’s two compact programs. Less a score in the traditional sense than a set of performance instructions, “The Witness” prompts any number of musicians to forge an impromptu musical experience out of the act of attentive listening — first to oneself, secondly to the other performers, and finally to, well, everyone.
As always with creations of this sort — improvisatory, un-notated, conceptual — “The Witness” feels problematic, or at least unorthodox, when considered through the lens of traditional authorship. The pleasures or longueurs of any given performance are far more the province of the performers themselves than of Oliveros’ verbal settings.
Yet in both gorounds, there was something inspiring the musicians to almost outlandish feats of vivacity and inventiveness. Bassist Richard Worn took the first shift solo (or as Schick put it, along with an imagined ensemble), and created a wondrous 15-minute skein of individual sounds, cryptic melodic utterances and increasingly dense musical textures.
At the end of the evening, a quintet of musicians — along with Worn, they were oboist Kyle Bruckmann, clarinetist Peter Josheff, percussionist Loren Mach and violinist Hrabba Atladottir — retraced similar steps in a vein that now felt both familiar and freshly revelatory.
In between came three short pieces by young local composers that drew on some of Oliveros’ conceptual repertoire in new ways. Danny Clay’s witty, winningly theatrical “Playbook” combined mime with musical sounds in surprising ways. John Ivers’ “Bellow, Cycle” interwove chordal passages with episodes of deep breathing, and Nathan Chamberlain’s “Dawn Chorus” elicited a variety of unpredictable gestures from the performers.
The first program of the evening was devoted to more traditional, notated fare, all of it beautiful and arresting. (The second night of the Players’ weekend, on Saturday, March 24, brought music by Celeste Oram, Xenakis and Feldman.)
It included the commissioned world premiere of “Cold Mountains, One Belt, Heartbreak Green,” a sweettoned, thoroughly entrancing instrumental work by Carolyn Chen. Over the space of 12 minutes, Chen creates a gently rhapsodic tapestry atop the cushiony sounds of a bass flute and bass drum; spare, tinkly notes gradually coalesce into a series of oscillating harmonies.
Something similar happens in Xavier Beteta’s enchanting octet “La Catedrale Abandonata,” which Schick also conducted — individual notes, first in octaves and unisons, spread out and diversify to create basic harmonic patterns that support an ever more vigorous musical dialogue. The effect is like watching stars flicker into view in a night sky, form constellations and fade away again.
Mezzo-soprano Sylvie Jensen joined the ensemble for a performance of Berio’s “Folk Songs” that was tonally and expressively rich, yet seemed stylistically a little out of sync with the rest of the evening.
And perhaps the most exciting component was the 1957 Grand Duet of Galina Ustvolskaya — a dynamic, abrasive, breathtakingly vigorous piece that got a formidable performance from cellist Stephen Harrison and pianist Kate Campbell. This is a piece that needs be a staple of every cello recital for the next 10 years, until it and Ustvolskaya’s other work are restored to their proper place in the repertoire.