Before there was such a thing as "World Music," the California composer Henry Cowell pretty much invented it. The Saturday afternoon concert of the Bard Music West festival last weekend was dedicated to Cowell's international bent, which began with an improvisation by Shahab Paranj on the tombak, an Iranian percussion instrument that was surprisingly multi-faceted in its sounds.
This was followed by Urban Inventory, a 2015 work by Wang Lu, who was raised in Xi'an, China and now teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island. The performers were Third Sound, a recently formed contemporary music ensemble from New York, with Romie de Guise-Langlois on clarinet, Karen Kim on violin, Michael Nicolas on cello, Orion Weiss on piano, and Sooyun Kim on flute who also doubled on a loud, shrieking piccolo in a few movements that made me cover my ears. The six-movement work also included prerecorded urban sounds of voices over speakers, and though the performance was expert, I found the experience unpleasant which may have been intentional.
Sonorous beauty was restored with the 1924 Sonatina by Mexican composer Carlos Chavez who Cowell championed over the decades. The lovely performance was by Luosha Fang on violin and Allegra Chapman on piano.
Tim Padgett then led a percussion quartet in the 1941 Double Music by John Cage and Lou Harrison. Both composers were students of Cowell and he introduced them to each other in the late 1930s, where they essentially invented the percussion ensemble in Western classical music, writing pieces for modern dance troupes in San Francisco and Oakland's Mills College. Double Music is a fascinating chance music experiment, where Harrison and Cage wrote 200 measures for two percussion voices independently and then layered the results together. It worked brilliantly.
The quartet, consisting of Padgett, Ben Paysen, Sam Rich and Mika Nakamura, then played Cowell's 1939 Return which was originally written for dancers to play instruments, which must have been something to see.
Cellist Michael Nicolas from Third Sound was the soulful soloist in Cowell's 1924 Adagio from Ensemble for String Quintet and Thunder Sticks minus the thunder sticks which the composer decided later in life didn't add much to to the composition.
The concert's finale was amazing, a performance of Cowell's 1957 Homage to Iran, with Allegra Chapman on piano, Luosha Fang on violin and Shahab Paranj improvising on the tombak. One of the weirder detours in American history must be Cowell, imprisoned at San Quentin for homosexuality in the 1930s, being selected as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department in the 1950s. During a world tour, he landed in the Middle East during the Suez Canal crisis, and was sent off to program radio shows in Iran where the CIA had recently stage managed the 1953 coup that installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The rare chance to hear this music live, particularly in such a thrilling performance, was one of the many highlights of Bard Music West festival, which is one of the most exciting new developments on the Bay Area music scene in a long while. I can't wait to see what they do next.
A remarkable new musical festival, Bard Music West, began in San Francisco last year and had its second outing last weekend. Co-founded by two recent graduates of the New York liberal arts Bard College, cellist Laura Gaynon and pianist Allegra Chapman (above) are following the template of the annual summer Bard Music Festival which focuses on a single composer and their world: colleagues, influences, and cultural milieu. This year's West Coast festival, held at the minimalist, acoustically lively Noe Valley Ministry church, was dedicated to the World of Henry Cowell (1897-1965), a wonderful choice as he was a Bay Area local who can plausibly be called the most important and influential American composer that most people have never heard of.
The opening performer was Berkeley pianist Sarah Cahill who has been one of Cowell's most passionate, informed advocates. She played High Color, which Cowell wrote in 1938 while serving four years of a 15-year sentence in San Quentin prison for being a homosexual who naively confessed it to the Redwood City police. In fact, the last time I heard High Color was when Sarah played it at a 2014 concert held in San Quentin prison featuring music that the composer had written while incarcerated.
This was followed by the local Volti acapella chorus (including the two basses above, Peter Dennis and Sidney Chen) singing a set of American church pieces by William Billings (1746-1800), William Walker (1809-75), and Cowell himself. The finale was Modern Musick, a funny 1781 piece by Billings that begins:
We are met for a Concert of modern invention;
To tickle the Ear is our present intention.
and ends:
And now we address you as Friends to the Cause;
Performers are modest and write their own Laws
Altho' we are sanguine and clap at the Bars,
'Tis the Part of the Hearers to clap their Applause
and the audience happily did so.
This was followed by the 1911 Charles Ives Piano Trio, which may rival his Fourth Symphony in complexity with its mashups of popular tunes piled on top of each other combined with stretches of mysterious, soulful beauty. Violinist Luosha Fang, pianist Allegra Chapman, and cellist Laura Gaynon were sensationally good and I can't imagine a better performance.
After intermission, Sarah Cahill returned to play the music of friends, students, and colleagues of Cowell, starting with two of Johanna Breyer's knotty 1934 pieces from Gebrauchs-Musik. This was followed by Bacchanale, a fun and nutty proto-minimalist prepared piano piece from 1940 by John Cage, and Dane Rudhyar's (1895-1985) Scriabin-like Stars from 1924 back on the grand piano. She finished with the wild, descriptive 1913 Suicide in an Airplane by the then-18-year-old Leo Ornstein who managed to live until he was 107. ("Lots of sleep and a big breakfast" were his keys to longevity according to Sarah who met him in his final years.)
The big surprise of the concert for me were the 1930 Three Chants for Women's Chorus by Ruth Crawford (1901-1953). Crawford is mostly famous for being the mother of folk singer Pete Seeger and wife of musicologist Charles Seeger who started the UC Berkeley Music Department and mentored the penniless Henry Cowell as a teenager. Crawford was also a daring modernist composer herself who unfortunately did not write enough because of marriage, motherhood and an early death. The three chants are titled To an Unkind God, To an Angel, and To a Kind God, and the text is a made-up language of sounds, rather like Meredith Monk would create 40 years later. Music Director Robert Geary above conducted the difficult music, with an occasional soloist stepping forward out of the sonic cloud. Shauna Falihee above was the exquisite soprano soloist in To an Angel, and the equally fine soprano Amy Foote and alto Celeste Winant shone in the Unkind/Kind God movements.
The To a Kind God chant was so dense, luminous and strange that it evoked the micropolyphony music of Ligeti 30 years before he started writing in that style. (Bard Music West's first festival, by the way, was devoted to the world of Ligeti.)
This was followed by violist Jessica Chang and pianist Allegra Chapman performing Cowell's 1947 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 7, which featured Cowell's characteristic mixture of modernism and tuneful classicism.
The long evening ended with an art song set by soprano Sara LeMesh, singing music by Carl Ruggles, William Grant Still, Otto Luening and four of the Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson by Aaron Copland. By this time, I was feeling musically overstuffed, not to mention that I don't really enjoy art songs/chansons/lieder all that much. However, according to all my concert companions, it was a beautiful set, nicely sung. Stay tuned for an account of the second festival concert, which was just as interesting as the first.
The weekly Presidio Picnic on the Parade Grounds from 11AM to 4PM on Sundays has begun again with the advent of spring.
To add to the outdoor walking pleasure...
...Halleck Street, which runs from Lincoln Boulevard down to the waterfront at Crissy Field...
...has been reopened.
The short roadway was closed in 2012 for the Doyle Drive tunnel construction...
...and the newly created overpass offers vistas...
...in all directions.
Be careful when crossing Marina Boulevard to the waterfront, though. This intersection is so new there still are no crosswalks and it was a little dodgy crossing the street.
One of the happiest resurrection stories I have witnessed in this lifetime is the former U.S. Army base's Crissy Field, which for decades was an expanse of asphalt and concrete, being restored to thriving wetlands. It offers hope that the world can heal.
Danny, Tony, and Dayala joined me at San Francisco's Civic Center on Saturday afternoon for the gun control March for Our Lives.
Unfortunately, I had foolishly misread the times for the speechifying (1 PM) and the actual start of the march (2:30 PM), which meant we were early, so we fled soon after Senator Dianne Feinstein was introduced onstage and she mentioned how good it was to see so many young people. ("Yeah, it would be nice if you would step aside and let somebody younger have a chance to be elected," someone was heard to mutter.)
We took a Muni train to the Embarcadero waterfront for a beer where we encountered a "pop-up drag queen" dressed as Lady Liberty who was preparing herself for the arrival of the march.
It was fun walking up an empty Market Street without worrying about being run over by bikes and cars.
The hundreds of marches across the country were being led by teenagers in many cases, and a bossy old woman organizer admonished us to not hang out at the beginning of the march because it was "youth to the front."
This struck as hilariously insulting. We did notice that the crowd skewed older than photos from other locations across the country, partly because the city is too expensive for most families to live. Plus, there were local, suburban marches held simultaneously around the Bay Area.
One of the more poignant contingents was an alumni group from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, site of the latest school massacre.
Who knew so many Floridians ended up in the Bay Area?
Like just about every other non-violent protest march in San Francisco, the SF Police Department was grotesquely over-represented and armed to the gills.
It made for a strange juxtaposition with the day's message.
