The Light Within - Bang on a Can 2016 Summer Marathon (Memory)
Today's Bang on a Can Summer Marathon 2016 memory (straight from canland.org) is focused on a piece called The Light Within by John Luther Adams.
Composer’s Notes (from his publisher’s website):
Sitting in the silence of their meetings, Quakers seek to "greet the light within". In his work, the artist James Turrell (a Quaker himself) says that he aspires to address "the light that we see in dreams".
On a crisp autumn day sitting inside Meeting - Turrell's skyspace at PS1 in Queens, New York - I experienced my own epiphany of light. From mid-afternoon through sunset into night, I was transfixed by the magical interplay of light and colour, above and within.
Over the hours the sky descended through every nameless shade of blue, to heaviest black. The light within the space rose from softest white, through ineffable yellow to deepest orange. Just after sunset there came a moment when outside and inside met in perfect equipoise. The midnight blue of the sky and the burnished peach of the room came together, fusing into one vibrant yet intangible plane...light becoming colour, becoming substance.
Out of this experience came The Light Within. A companion to The Light That Fills the World (1999/2001), the harmonic colours of this new piece are more complex and mercurial than those of its outward-looking predecessor. Within this more introspective sonic space, the light changes more quickly, embracing darker hues and deeper shadows. - John Luther Adams
Preparation
So right away, this piece was something I wanted to make sure I had a solid start to before I arrived for the summer festival because John Luther Adams was the composer-in-residence for that year. I had heard of some of his exploits through friends who loved his ability to create unique listening experiences inspired by nature or have helped in the premiere of some of his works like Sila: Breath of the World. On paper, this piece looked simple enough: chords blocked out with whole notes on different bars, the composer’s direction to play them as “arpeggios, rising and falling throughout,” and knowing that my sequences would blend with drone strings and rolled mallet percussion. I made sure that I had a grasp on the notes, I made notes in my score of when things shifted and how to approach certain note clusters, and I felt ready to take to the group rehearsals.
Rehearsal
This was where the piece really began to make sense. I couldn’t just arpeggiate the chords like I normally would for classical pieces, where the starting point and destination of the phrase dictates who I would shape the notes (ex. Softer to louder, rubato, accenting the peak of the shape). I had to really dig in, rolling the chords to almost mimic waves rolling into shore. Even then, the blending of the electronics with the strings meant that I had very little to grab on to aurally for cues, since my chords were more metered by time than meter. What I mean by this, is that instead of a usual dictation of metered time (ex. 4/4 being 4 beats in a measure set by a tempo) it was instead dictated by actual time that you measured on a clock. So there is a feeling of suspended time, way more so than Still Life with Avalanche (see yesterday’s post).
The ensemble worked hard on this piece for two weeks, and then the final week leading up to the performance we were coached by John Luther Adams himself. He immediately addressed my playing, as there were still aspects of how to properly blend with the ensemble while creating the harmonics/overtones from my part that he desired. Since the sustain pedal is held throughout, the sound differs with the amount of notes I’m playing, the speed at which I’m playing them, and the register I’m playing notes in general on the piano. He had me making sure that things were churning, but not strictly uniform (more character to arpeggios than an etude). He made me really dig in, making a seemingly easy piece into a force of nature to contend with for 12 minutes. All of his direction started making sense, and while some moments were frustrating for me personally, I always enjoy having the composer around to really help me as a performer realize their vision. It’s one of the many reasons I enjoy contemporary classical music!
Performance
What a mesmerizing experience the performance day was! Having to focus so intensely on the things I gleaned from chamber group rehearsals and John Luther Adams’ coaching in real time while also being lulled into a hypnotic state from the music was much more pleasant than arduous. The audience was thrown into a trance as well, soaking in the rich timbres and textures from the specific pairings of instrument sounds with the electronic backing track. I wish there was some way we could have mirrored the lighting to match the description of the piece, but overall the performance felt great. The audience starts to clap at the end before my last note (which who knows if that was correct or not, but it did punctuate the ending!), and there is a few seconds of silence afterwards to really let the performers exhale. Once things snapped into reality, we all couldn’t help but smile!
Ensemble:
Nick Photinos - Cello/Director
Maria-Fiore Mazzarini - Violin
Hila Zamir - Clarinet/Bass Clarinet
Gina Izzo - Flute/Harmonica
Josh Graham - Percussion
Dutcher Snedeker - Piano
Check out the piece below or on canland.org here - https://canland.org/the-light-within/