The couple in the photo above are Joseph Di Ponio and Stephanie Corwin. Joseph is a composer and a co-director of Ensemble Ipse, "a contemporary music ensemble dedicated to showcasing the wide variety of practices in the current new music scene." Stephanie plays both modern and baroque bassoons - she is holding the latter in the photo - and is a member of Repast Baroque, which "is committed to sharing the spirit of seventeenth- and eighteenth century chamber music with audiences in New York and beyond." The other three members of Repast are in the photo's background. Left to right they are: Natalie Rose Kress, violin; Gabe Shuford, harpsichord; and Sarah Abigael Stone, viola da gamba, who serves as Repast's artistic director. During the bleak days of the pandemic, I got cheer online from Sarah's "Bach Everyday."
Given the different musical focuses of Ipse and Repast, it's tempting to think of Joseph and Stephanie as a musical odd couple. They were, nevertheless, determined to find a way for the two groups to interact and produce a concert that could please members of both of their groups' usual audiences. This came to fruition last Sunday in a concert, "Science Fiction: the Music of the Spheres," at the First Unitarian Congregational Society, Brooklyn.
The concert began with Sarah's instrumental arrangement of Sfogava con le stelle from Il quarto libro di madrigali (1603) by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). The program notes quote the lyrics (unsung in this performance) of the madrigal as being about "a lovesick man" who was "venting to the stars" in which he saw "beautiful images of my idol whom I adore" and begs them to "so demonstrate to her my loving ardour." The music captured this sense of longing.
We then moved from the early seventeenth century to the present with "Other Fields of Gravity" by Molly Herron, who describes it as her impression of what it would be like "to be at the very edge of earth's gravitational pull" where she would "feel the gentle tug of other fields of gravity." Each of these would have "its own texture, taste, color." The music, conducted, as all the contemporary works in the concert were, by Matt Ward, evoked these senses. This was its world premiere, as it was for all the contemporary pieces in the concert.
Next was a revisit to the seventeenth century with Sonate concertate a 2 in stil moderno No.8 (1621) by Dario Castello (1602-1631), whose works were within the avant garde of the time, "push[ing] the boundaries of harmonic expression and virtuosity." This showcased performances by Natalie on violin and Stephanie on bassoon.
We returned to present time with "Harmonious Diesis" by Judith Berkson. "Diesis," according to the program notes, "refers to a small musical interval, represented here by the small pitch difference between both ensembles (Ipse is tuned to A=432Hz and Repast to A=415Hz)." This may seem a recipe for discomforting dissonance. Instead, the composer argues, it is "[l]ike hearing a musical memory while processing something new, where the difference between the past and the present is experienced through sound." I agree with her characterization. At the conclusion of the piece, Gabe's harpsichord became "the terrain for the tunings to diverge and merge with one another."
Joseph got to show his chops as a composer with "A Continuity of Rooms" which, like "Other Fields of Gravity," explores the interaction between a large entity, in "Other Fields" earth and in "A Continuity" an art museum, and more distant or lesser entities, in "Other Fields" the moon, sun, and planets; in "A Continuity" galleries and the corridors connecting them. Both pieces, in my view, succeed in evoking a sense of the relationships between entities greater and smaller and, in "A Continuity," inclusive.
After a break we returned to hear "Mars Hill" by Stephanie Griffin, who is also Ipse's violist. The piece takes its title from the town of Mars Hill, North Carolina, where the composer spent time in the Emerson Dorsch Artist Residency, and is dedicated to its founders, Tyler Emerson-Dorsch and Brook Dorsch, and its executive director, Ibett Yanez del Castillo. It opens with "high pitched morning sounds" initially produced by a duet between Margaret Lancaster on piccolo and Alex Shiozaki on violin. It then "winds its way down in register until the sky explodes with stars and visions of distant planets orbiting in perfect harmony around another imagined sun." Special praise must be given to percussionist Colleen Bernstein for her deft handling in rapid succession of drums, triangle, tiny tinkling bells, and a gong.
Next on the program was "Zero Body Problem" by Max Giteck Duykers. The program notes for this consist entirely of a three paragraph quotation from Richard D. Matuck's A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem. "Feynman" was Richard Feynman, nobel prize winning physicist known for his work on quantum field theory. The quotation from Mattuck concludes: "And within modern quantum field theory, the problem of zero bodies (vacuum) is insoluble. So, if we are out after exact solutions, no bodies at all is already too many." My scrawled notes on the program about this piece are "Slow, then lively." The "lively" part may be an expression of the notion "too many." In any event, I didn't find the music "insoluble"; I found it enjoyable.
The concert ended as it began, with Monteverdi; this time with Sarah's arrangement of O stellae coruscantes (1607) which, the program notes, is a "sacred contrafactum of Sfogava con le stelle" (1603), the Monteverdi piece that began the concert. While the earlier piece expressed romantic longing, the later sees heavenly bodies as "genial images of Him whom I worship" and concludes with "Praise Him eternally." It was approriately worshipful.
Yes, I enjoyed this concert, from start to finish. Not everyone did. During the contemporary pieces a few people got up and left. Some years ago I might have done likewise. How did I change my mind? By listening. In part it was some works by David Lang, whom I met when our chidren were schoolmates, and in part just by hearing contemporary pieces on WQXR. I came to appreciate music that didn't always conform to familiar patterns of chord progression, rhythm, or harmony.
Is one of the things music can do, beyond providing us with familiar pleasures, expanding our ability to respond to aural experiences previously unfamiliar to us? I can't help recalling the time in 1956 when I was ten years old and with my father, riding in our '55 Chevy along a two lane blacktop in the pine clad woods of the Florida Panhandle. Dad had the radio tuned to a local station that played country music. The DJ said, "Now, here's Elvis Presley." I'd heard of this guy and seen pictures of him wearing lavender suits with frilly trim. I'd read that he drove girls crazy, so I assumed he was a crooner, in the mode of Frank Sinatra of Vic Damone. Then I heard a single guitar chord, followed by "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog" in a growling voice, and lots of frenetic rhythm. I thought, "Obviously this is a song Elvis Presley has done as a joke, but I love it!"
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