New Horizons, and a Tribute
In keeping with a Black Lives Matter theme, a new SFCMP chamber-concert stream features leading black composers in lucid quality performances capped by a tribute to the late Olly Wilson. Wilson achieved a goal that music professors strive to emulate: as habile a teacher as a composer.
Wilson is well remembered for his 22 years as composer on the UC Berkeley music faculty and his later strong support for the Young Musicians Program training underserved students in the S.F. Bay Area. Winner of the 2008 Rome Prize, he was also the first black music professor at Cal. His wide-ranging musical interests ran from instrumental-classical to electronic to West African. I remember him fondly, given his articulate talks, incisive interviews and his supremely diplomatic, soft-spoken manner. He had died in 2018 at the age of 80.
Two-thirds of this program revolves around Olly, notably Tyshawn Sorey’s “Olly Woodrow Wilson, Jr. (In Memoriam)”—the correct name, yes, but a curious title choice, given President Woodrow Wilson’s well-documented depreciation of African-Americans. Now in its U.S. premiere, Sorey’s is an eloquent exercise in solitude, with droplets of isolated sounds of extreme softness, somewhere between the musical spaces of Pärt, Takemitsu and above all Morton Feldman. This threnody for 15 of the S.F. Contemporary Music Players stretches out silence between isolated, consonant chords in minor keys, making optimum use of lower-register instruments like English horn and bass clarinet. Unexpectedly, this curiously quiet 22-minute piece perks up one’s ears again and again with its solemn, somber textures. A crescendo ushers in the finale, with ever more threatening timpani strokes as the tragedy sinks in. All the works but Reid’s are conducted by Eric Dudley in a forthright no-nonsense manner.
The work had had its premiere with the elite Parisian Ensemble Intercontemporain, no less.
For composer Sorey, best known for his jazz work, this is a salient departure from the predictable, thereby making an even more memorable impact. He had been named a Macarthur “genius” Fellow, then composer of the year 2020 by the N.Y. Times.
Wilson’s own “A City Called Heaven” for a similarly sized group is notable for its great articulation and its nimble character, suggesting to me the nimbleness I might need to actually get to heaven. There are aphoristic comments thrown back and forth between marimba and the violin-viola duo, and a significant four-note phrase that is initially predominant. A mellow middle section features a delectable interplay of clarinet on high and cello far below. The composer achieved considerable cohesion while showing his love of sonorities.
The 58-minute concert stream ends with Tomeka Reid’s brief “Prospective Dwellers” for string quartet, an animated sad song with an uplifting jaunty Latin lilt, more suggestive of Villa-Lobos’ musical texture than of jazz. Like Sorey, she is a fortysomething American.
SEASON FINALE for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players conducted by Eric Dudley in concert of Wilson, Sorey, Reid, presented streaming online till Aug. 10, via sfcmp.org.
