Each August, I make a pilgrimage to the TIME:SPANS Festival to hear (mostly) composed music. I’m certainly not alone: the festival has become the end-of-summer destination for people who like new music, experimental music, whatever you want to call it, and live in New York. This year, I attended two performances from the extravaganza by the Canadian string quartet Quatuor Bozzini and the percussion/piano duo Yarn/Wire in collaboration with Endlings (Raven Chacon and John Dieterich). These concerts covered two sides of the experimental music coin: storminess and gentleness.
Yarn/Wire and Endlings are a natural pairing, with both exhibiting an open-minded approach to music. Their premiere was characteristic of this expansiveness and brought a welcome unpredictability. The stage was littered with percussion instruments — the usuals like drum kits, vibraphones, as well as some random everyday objects — and all were put to use at some point. There were moments of slithering improvisation; of desolate, icy quietude; of screeching metal; of pulsing drones. Most intriguing was the speaker set-up, akin to Chacon’s work with spatial sound installations, in which music echoed around the room in accordance with speaker placement to create a full-body experience. In DiMenna, an underground box, the feeling was that of diving deep into the pitch black ocean, a subterranean rumble not from a subway outside but unearthed by the ensemble’s bass drums and electronics. And while their music was often unruly and massive, they also embraced a sense of levity. Many of their melodies were played with a light touch; their use of every instrument felt like an embrace of the joy of chaos rather than an attempt at taming it.
Quatuor Bozzini offered another approach: This quartet is notable for their ability to play quiet, soft, droning music, finding space in solitude (see: their recordings of Jürg Frey or Éliane Radigue). For a string quartet, it’s often easy to play loud, harder to find the power in austerity, held notes, the subtle changing of time. At TIME:SPANS, two pieces unfortunately focused less on this strength and more on an academic approach to composition. Taylor Brook’s Vinetan Songs had some moments of the gossamer threads that Quatuor Bozzini weave so well, but got lost in both concept and technique for the sake of technique; Zosha di Castri’s Delve was well-composed for string quartet, but was teeming with riffs that took away from the music’s potential for deep resonance.
But Cassandra Miller’s Three Songs was stunning. I often look for the spiritual in music, especially in live music — the moments of otherworldliness, of the ephemeral, of the fleeting. When the first tone of Three Songs rang, warm and radiant, a soothing harmony born from the woody resonance of a string quartet, the magic was there. Each phrase was unobscured, performed with little ornamentation, favoring richness, fullness, and depth discovered in the unadorned tone. Much of the piece moved slowly, reverberating as one phrase fluttered away and another floated and dispersed. What was most exciting, though, was not melody but harmony, the way each chord moved from consonance into dissonance with as much as an unheard bow stroke. It was a masterclass in the subtle drone — music as elusive as feeling, music as essential yet invisible as breathing. I cried, I left, I smiled.