Kinetic Ensemble opens eighth season with a celebration of nature
Program includes a piece inspired by the Texas freeze, ‘What Happens When Pipes Burst?’
Belonging to a conductorfree chamber orchestra keeps her on her toes, says Kinetic Ensemble artistic director and violinist Natalie Lin Douglas, but the payoff is worth it.
“As one of the performers, I feel like my senses are heightened because I have to pay attention in order to make sure the whole engine runs properly,” she says. “I think all the musicians feel that stake, that investment in making sure that the ensemble works and performs as one.”
Sixteen string players strong, Kinetic will open its eighth season Oct. 9 with “The Wilderness Anthology,” an evening of pieces inspired by nature. Premiered in 1938, Hungarian composer Leo Weiner’s Pastoral, Phantasy et Fugue is something of an outlier: Although Kinetic’s programming leans heavily on contemporary music and living composers, Lin Douglas often plugs in older repertoire to keep the concerts well balanced.
For “A String Quartet is Like a Flock of Birds,” which Kinetic originally performed at a virtual concert during the pandemic, Chicago-based composer Paul Novak draws a connection between musicians’ lockdown experiences and birds’ ever-shifting flight formations — exploring, Lin Douglas says, “how the musicians in the string quartet can follow that flexible pattern.” (Novak studied at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, as did Lin Douglas and many other Kinetic members.) Patrick Harlin’s title piece, meanwhile, draws on the Seattle-bred composer’s extensive research into ecological soundscapes.
“His argument is that if these ecosystems are destroyed for various reasons, we not only lose the actual physical trees and forests and that sort of thing, but we also lose sound,” says Lin Douglas. “His piece combines some of these sounds that he’s recorded with live performance, so that’s a particularly unique piece.”
The fourth piece should strike a chord with many Houstonians. Currently a doctoral candidate at the Shepherd School, Nicky Sohn is Kinetic’s composer-in-residence for the season. Her “What Happens When Pipes Burst?” grew out of her experiences during the February 2021 winter storm. Like millions of others, the sudden drop to sub-Arctic temperatures threw Sohn’s life into disarray: She had to miss her best friend’s wedding in LA and her pet fish died.
“I was very taken aback by how vulnerable we all are to nature and also to electricity,” she says. “Everything that’s connected to us, we are so vulnerable when everything is just taken away without preparation.”
According to Sohn, “What Happens When Pipes Burst?” reflects the initial shock and confusion of the freeze through tense chromatic harmonies and persistent buzzing noises. The section memorializing her fish grows slow and somber, almost like an elegy, while explosive sounds reflect pipes bursting before the piece closes in a vortex of unresolved emotions.
“I felt this (situation) wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon, and we didn’t know the end date to it, so there’s a lot of frustration and anger towards the end of the piece,” she says. “There’s more explosions and the ranges of the instruments become bigger. I thought a lot about these gestures and this energy level that I was feeling in the orchestra, or (that) the string orchestra can portray.”
The variety of moods and textures in Sohn’s piece is wellsuited to Kinetic’s talents, Lin Douglas believes. “I think one stylistic strength of Kinetic is that our playing is quite versatile, so it can be extremely rhythmic and percussive, but it can also be very lush: kind of what you might think of in a typical string section,” she says. “I think Nicky’s writing emphasizes those extremes quite well.”
Sohn is also writing a violin concerto for her good friend Mary Grace Johnson, who will be curating Kinetic’s next concert in March. (Kinetic’s next album should be released around that time as well.) Titled “Her Story,” the program is inspired by the residents of local recovery facility Women’s Home Houston and features a collaboration with choreographer Kayla Collymore. Such adventurous and thoughtful programming has become a Kinetic specialty by now: No one quite knows how it’s going to turn out, precisely why the group keeps going.
“It’s particularly exciting because when you commission a composer, you have some sense what the piece might be like, or what it might be about, but you really don’t know until they’ve written it,” Lin Douglas says. “And so you sort of take a chance, you take a risk, and then you discover the piece along with everyone else.
That’s been a really fun part about programming Kinetic’s season.”