Riding Solo: Musicians Go It Alone at Cutting Edge Concerts
Opening night of the festival featured seven works, all solo compositions. The whole thing was congenial, hopeful, and disorganized, but in a fun way.
It was indicative of the atmosphere at Symphony Space Wednesday night that Jeffrey Mumford, the composer whose work, …becoming clear (2017), was about to be performed, said some words about the piece, walked down the aisle into the audience, pointed at an empty seat, and whispered, “Is this free?”
Relaxed. Congenial. Fraternal. Impromptu. The opening night of this year’s Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival was all of these things. As Steve Smith pointed out in a blog post earlier in the day, there had been a lull a little over a week long between the last show of TIME:SPANS and the first show of Cutting Edge, which marked the beginning of New York’s jam-packed fall season of new music concerts. The other night, you could tell people were raring to feed on the newest of the new.
Someone is always saying, “music is finally back after the pandemic,” but this really felt like the return of something special. Maybe not live performance generally, but live performance of new music that is going somewhere, and isn’t stifled by the anxiety that everything could shut down again tomorrow. It feels like we can look into the future with hope and excitement. But the pandemic must have done something to new classical music. And I’m curious to see what it wrought.
For one, it made it a lot more chill. Not only did Mumford have to ask for a seat in the audience, but Victoria Bond didn’t even introduce herself. And she was the emcee! Bond is the first woman to have obtained a Ph.D. in conducting from Juilliard and she is, as her bio states, “a major force in 21st century concert music.” But because she didn’t tell us who she is, an air of humanity immediately descended upon the hall, and the anonymity of the emcee meant that Bond did not overshadow the musicians. The program also failed to mention that there was a world premiere — Mina Arissian’s Cello Sonata — and it had no composition years for the other pieces. But who cares about such trifles?
After Bond and Eliesha Nelson, the violist who alone took the first half of the concert, intimated that there had been electrical problems with the recording that was about to back her, everyone laughed and the concert got started.
First up was Bond’s own 2011 composition, Jasmine Flower, based on a well-known Chinese folk melody. The piece alternates between soaring melodic lines and jagged, sarcastic outbursts. Nelson captured the humor of the latter and reveled in the unique resonance of the viola as she cherished the lyrical, speechlike contours of the former.
Then came Missy Mazzoli’s Tooth and Nail (2010), written for violist Nadia Sirota, but most recently featured on violinist Yvonne Lam’s album, Watch Over Us, which came out in July. Written for solo violin/viola with pre-recorded electronic accompaniment, the piece begins with a continuous plucking that reminded me of Steve Reich’s “phase music.” It was actually inspired by the jaw harp, which the player plucks while changing the shape of the small harp in their mouth. But this electronic minimalist fabric – which, according to Mazzoli, is made up almost entirely of viola samples – is overlayed with a fragmented and unpredictable viola line, played by Nelson. The backing track features lush strings, crescendoing and contracting, calling and responding to Nelson’s phrases.
At points, the effect was beautiful. The pleasure of listening to the piece comes in hearing how the acoustic and electronic sounds blend together. I played a game with myself where I would close my eyes and try to guess whether what I was hearing was Nelson or a string instrument in the recording. I was surprised several times when I opened my eyes and saw which it was. At one point, the phrase that Nelson played was suddenly taken up by a viola in the recorded orchestra, while she took the motive that that instrument was playing. It made for a seamless transition between acoustic and electric. Nelson had a lovely lyrical way of playing, but sometimes sounded dull. Maybe it was the fault of the instrument. The viola has a woodier, rougher sound than the violin, and it’s uncommon to hear it by itself.
The highlight of the concert was Miranda Cuckson’s performance of Jeffrey Mumford’s fleeting cycles of layered air (2020), a two-movement piece inspired by whisps of wind and trails of clouds. It is an encyclopedia of techniques that is both physically demanding – sometimes requiring the violinist to stretch her fingers very far apart – and surprisingly heartbreaking. Fleeting, quick quiet whispers of fast notes that sound airy mix with thunderbolt plucks that pierce the brain. At one point, Cuckson plucked and immediately bowed a long note and it sounded magical. Cuckson gave character to the piece like no one else could. I could listen to her play all day. She gives direction to this music that might be directionless in the hands of another violinist.
Frank Oteri, who just stepped down after a legendary 24-year career as the editor of NewMusicBox, agreed. He was sitting behind me, masked and dignified. After Cuckson finished the first movement, I heard him say, quietly, to his wife, “The timing!” This really was the thing that made the performance impressive. In a piece full of hemming and hawing and gaps of silence and extended techniques – like sul ponticello (extremely quietly) and loud interjections played ordinario (normally) – Cuckson gave pathos and form to choppiness. That’s not a dig at the music, but a testament to Cuckson’s ability to bring the hidden form out of a piece of written music and communicate it to the audience.
Shockingly, the music sounded like it had something to say. Sometimes, I think that new music is getting so far away from an ability to “communicate” anything or act as any type of language, but Cuckson’s playing showed me that this might be a fallacy and is probably more of a problem with the performers than with the music itself.
Cuckson also played Ileana Perez Velasquez’s The road not taken (2023), inspired by the Frost poem. The composer pointed out that she had not heard of the poem until she came to the US from Cuba and discovered its “deep meaning.” One usually thinks that a poem so popular is cliché to write about because everyone knows it. But it was refreshing to hear the story of someone who, in her adult life, discovered Frost without knowing the poem was famous. At times reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, other times of Bartok’s violin concerti, and still others like a pentatonic Schoenberg, the piece was amalgam of influences. All were brought out with confidence and focus by Cuckson.
The cellist Brian Thornton took the last two pieces. First, he played Nina Barzegar’s Vulnerable (2018), inspired by sounds from her native Iran. Portamento and pizzicato lush chords made it feel like the music was filling your chest with health. Thornton evidently enjoyed himself. He was smiling and acting out the moods of the music, and his passion transferred into his playing, as he revealed lively contrasts between extended techniques – like plucking a note and going into portamento –and those full-body beautiful chords. He also played Mina Arissian’s Cello Sonata, a world premiere inspired by the composer’s experience during the pandemic. Thornton summed up the piece to the audience as having three movements: the first, about getting “through” the pandemic, the second, an “intermezzo” about reflection or something, and third, about “moving on” after the pandemic. I didn’t quite hear the content of what she was trying to communicate and I couldn’t stay engaged. Enough with pandemic music. Just make music and we’ll decide how the pandemic affected it.
After the show was over, a mob of musicians and composers from the audience swarmed attendee Tania León, the Cuban-American composer who won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2021 for her work, Stride. They were laughing, hugging, sharing books they had read recently. Everyone was talking to everyone. You don’t see this at Carnegie Hall. Seek out the small shows. They’re more absorbing. And more fun.