MIVOS QUARTET PERFORMS SOUNDS OF ARCTIC
If you attend a string quartet concert and the musicians are seated on platforms above you in the four corners of the hall, it’s a good bet that you are at the University of California San Diego.
On Saturday, the Mivos Quartet premiered UCSD Department of Music professor Lei Liang’s “Six Seasons” in the Conrad Prebys Music Center’s Experimental Theater. I attended the first of two shows presented by ArtPower.
“Six Seasons” is a unique collaboration between a composer (Liang), an oceanographer (Joshua Jones), a team of audio engineers, and the Mivos Quartet. Using Arctic recordings of ice, whales and seals, Liang created a 50-minute-long underwater soundscape.
State-of-the-art underwater microphones were placed about 1,000 feet below the surface of the Chukchi Sea, 100 miles north of Point Barrow, the northernmost land in the U.S.
You may not think that ice makes sounds, but the first two movements of “Six Seasons” use nothing but recorded ice. It crackles, crunches and hisses, the results of water freezing and ice plates breaking or rubbing against each other. These sounds were projected from speakers near each of the instrumentalists.
Liang has incorporated improvisation into his scores in the past, but that tends to occur within the context of traditionally notated music. For “Six Seasons,” he asked the performers to freely improvise with the soundscape, taking texts and images as further cues.
He compares the musician’s reactions to the recordings as “echolocation,” similar to the ways that whales send out sounds and receive the echoes to detect objects.
After a few minutes of ice crackling, violinist Maya Bennardo scraped her bow on her strings. What emerged was not a melody in any conventional sense, but short crunching sounds.
Cellist Tyler J. Borden held his bow with a hand on each end, placed its midpoint on the end of the cello fingerboard, and slowly spun the bow from one angle to the next — picture 10 to 4 o’clock to 20 to 3 o’clock and back again. This produced crunches and short groans, like an unoiled door hinge.
Violist Victor Lowrie Tafoya and violinist Olivia De Prato joined in with similar crackles and crunches. Their instruments were miked and mixed into the recorded sounds. At times, it was difficult to tell if one heard ice or instruments. Other ice-like sounds included dryly plucking the strings above the left hand; sliding fingers up and down the fingerboard, creating an airy sound; and bowing the wood, bridges and tailpieces of their instruments.
Liang’s piece begins in what Inuits call Ukiaqsaaq, the time when new ice forms on the ocean. As “Six Seasons” progresses, we hear heavy ice accumulate and eventually melt. Halfway through, we hear the calls of seals, belugas and bowhead whales returning to the Chukchi Sea.
As mammals sounded more, the Mivos Quartet expanded their sonic vocabularies. Borden dragged a superball across the back of his cello to generate low, whale-like groans. The upper strings brought more pitch into their playing.
The last two movements featured a profusion of these mammals calling in the open waters before ice forces them to migrate to the Pacific Ocean, with the Mivos Quartet responding in kind. In a haunting coda, the last sound heard was the cry of a beluga, trapped beneath ice, getting softer and softer.
Most of us would not visit Point Barrow, let alone submerge into the frigid sea to experience these sounds in person. Liang, Jones, and the Mivos Quartet evoked a year’s worth of sounds in a little under an hour, bringing a cold, beautiful sonic world to sunny San Diego. Those present acknowledged their gratitude with warm applause.