Ingram Marshall Memorial Concert

San Francisco Performances hosted a memorial concert last Saturday for the American composer Ingram Marshall (above), who died last May at the age of 80. There was already a memorial concert last October at New York Public Radio's small Greene Space and the Yale School of Music in November with various musicians who Marshall had written music for. (There's a good recording on YouTube of the New York concert, click here.) Marshall was bicoastal, in that he was born and raised in New England, was a professor and an important, inventive composer on the West Coast for over 25 years, before returning home to New England where he continued composing and teaching.

The Left Coast memorial concert in San Francisco involved most of the same artists as New York, but this was a more extravagant affair, beginning with the beauty of Herbst Theater in the Veterans Building as a memorial stage. Pianist Sarah Cahill was the hostess, interviewing performers about the music they were playing while the stage would be reset for the next musical ensemble.

Ben Verdery played the 1999 Soe-pa for solo guitar and a looping laptop which had been written for him, and it was the first of a series of works involving live and prerecorded music intertwining. Marshall had been composing for this form using tape in the pre-digital age and what is striking about all those pieces is how difficult it is to distinguish the live from the electronic. The sonic effect is not so much a duet as a unified collage.

Sarah Cahill played the gorgeous piano piece Marshall had written for her in 2001, Authentic Presence. It is mostly meditative and semi-minimalist in style, but midway it explodes into a huge flowerburst of notes, which sounded like it could be augmented with a prerecorded track, but Cahill confirmed it was her fingers alone.

The work that brought Marshall some fame was the 1981 Fog Tropes, written for a brass sextet interacting with a tape the composer had created of San Francisco Bay foghorns. It premiered in 1981 at a New & Unusual Concert programmed by John Adams, Marshall's composer friend and colleague. Soon after it was played at Davies Hall with Edo de Waart conducting, which I happened to stumble into. The piece sounded wistful, mysterious, and very cool. Last Saturday the work was conducted by Edwin Outwater with the SF Conservatory of Music Brass Sextet, who all sounded top-notch.

After intermission, we heard the 1993 Dark Waters, written for woodwind legend Libby Van Cleve who played the English Horn in tandem with a fragmented, sampled old recording of Sibelius's The Swan of Tuonela. The Finnish version of the River Styx is Tuonela, where the dead cross the water from the land of the living to the shore of the dead. Again, the work sounded so cohesive that it was impossible at times to know what was live and what was tape.

The final work was Flow, for piano and chamber orchestra, written for Marshall's former student Timo Andres and his old colleague John Adams.

On Saturday, Adams conducted the buoyant 15-minute semi-concerto in a wonderful performance from a pickup SF Conservatory chamber orchestra, and Timo Andres seemed to be having a ball as the soloist. Most of Marshall's music I have heard has a strong streak of melancholy running through it so it was a pleasure to hear a happier strain.

What came across from the anecdotes about Marshall was how generous he was with his attention, making one feel as if they were the most important person in the world. "Sampled" from Ms. Van Cleve's Facebook page, the above after-performance photo is of Timo Andres, Libby Van Cleve, Ben Verdery, John Adams, and Sarah Cahill. They did their friend justice.