Musiqa’s ‘Moving Images’ integrates music and film.
Thankfully, classical music in the 21st century has progressed beyond stolid, middle-aged white guys in tuxes walking out on a stage, performing, then walking off again to restrained applause.
Progressive music organizations continually seek not just new music to perform, but also novel ways to package and present it. So it was that Houston’s Musiqa performed “The Moving Image” Saturday night at the MATCH. The five works in the program demonstrated different approaches to integrating music with film, and while some were more successful than others, all were valid.
“Perhaps,” composer Reena Esmail’s collaboration with filmmaker Heather McCalden, employed the most familiar approach, the bucolic lyricism of Esmail’s music serving as an atmospheric soundtrack to McCalden’s moody seaside meditation.
At first glance, Musiqa’s world-premiere commission “Southern Specter” took the same approach. However, the eerie drama of Timothy Roy’s score — as performed by the accomplished musicians of Loop38 — delved deeper, seeming to animate filmmaker Richard Johnson’s shifting rumination on Spanish moss. The ghostly apparitions of Johnson’s film, sometimes seen in microscopic close-up and at others in a morphing kaleidoscope, came fascinatingly alive as Roy’s complex score seemed to propel Johnson’s images.
“Steelworks” went the found-footage route, matching Anna Clyne’s industrious score with Luke DuBois’ split-screen vintage footage of Brooklyn’s last steelworks factory, percussive sounds from the film augmenting the vibraphone’s busy obbligato underneath the woodwind melody. The introduction of molten steel footage brought vibrant color to the hitherto black-and-white footage and sent the solo flute into an excited flight of lyric fancy. Clyne’s score and the moving image of flowing, golden steel evoked the animated volcanic activity in one of the more popular attempts to wed classical music and film: “The Rite of Spring” sequence in Disney’s “Fantasia.”
But Saturday night, it was the finale that turned to animation in “history of the world in seven acts.” Jonathan Bachrach’s whimsical computer-animated geometric and molecular forms integrated, disintegrated and reintegrated to Michael Gandolfi’s lyrical score, using minimalism to imaginative effect in perhaps the most mainstream work of the evening.
Great interest centered on the first work of the evening, “Transit,” by Dutch composer and filmmaker Michel van der Aa whose “Sunken Garden” at Dallas Opera promises a groundbreaking fusion of film and opera. Alternately bleak and fearfully restless, van der Aa’s score for solo piano propelled the filmic depiction of an anxious old man’s struggle with his life of debilitating solitude. Creating both film and score, auteur van der Aa skillfully focused the audience’s attention wherever he wanted it in the moment to maximum dramatic effect.
“Transit” seemed the performance’s most innovative blend of music and film, and along with “Southern Specter” the most successful and engaging. But all five worked on their own terms and were enthusiastically received by Saturday night’s appreciative audience, as were the often athletic performances of the musicians of Loop38.
This could very well work as an annual film and music event, or perhaps a broader exploration of how to merge new media with classical music to the benefit and advancement of both.