New-music fans, buzzing with anticipation, turned out in force to hear not one but two world premieres by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey on Tuesday, Feb. 25, at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall.
The program, presented by Monday Evening Concerts, was chiefly devoted to For Julius Eastman, a haunting, meditative, and healing 45-minute composition for solo piano that honors the legacy of one of the overlooked Black composers whom Sorey has championed throughout his peripatetic career. Sarah Rothenberg, Sorey’s longtime collaborator and an enthusiastic comrade in assaulting the barriers between genres and categories, commanded the keyboard. Playing with eloquence and poetic intensity, she grabbed our attention from the first quiet scattered notes and kept us enthralled for the entire work, creating a timeless and spellbinding pointillist tableau, a nonlinear study in timbre, color, and the power of silence.
Opening the concert was After “The King of Denmark” — Sorey’s loving update of Morton Feldman’s 1964 classic of the modern percussion repertoire, a study in color and pitch for a dazzling array of instruments. Sorey, an acclaimed and highly experienced percussionist who has appeared with leading jazz and classical ensembles, was the remarkably nuanced and deft soloist here, moving like a dancer among cymbals, drums, chimes, bells, xylophone, woodblocks, and more.
Together, the evening’s two pieces participated in a provocative synergistic dialogue, both of them fascinating explorations of pointillism for percussion instruments (here the piano belongs to the percussion family, not the strings) and of the essential role of silence in music. The program provided yet another example of the mobility and fluidity of Sorey’s work. He has a special gift for blending composition and improvisation, jazz and classical traditions, and a zeal for reviving and reinvigorating the music of marginalized people.
That Los Angeles’ venerable Monday Evening Concerts, “the world’s longest-running series devoted to contemporary music,” inaugurated in 1939, was the presenter seemed entirely fitting. Over the decades, MEC has hosted premieres by earlier iconoclasts such as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg and served as a launching pad for musicians including Pierre Boulez and Michael Tilson Thomas. Tuesday’s program paid tribute to MEC’s advocacy of Eastman (1940–1990) and Feldman (1926–1987), two composers who knew each other well. As a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which was a hotbed of musical innovation in the 1960s and 1970s, Feldman mentored Eastman, a multitalented, defiantly queer “misfit” whose promising multidisciplinary career came to a tragic end in homelessness and drug abuse.
The title The King of Denmark refers to the silent protest of that monarch, who after the Nazi conquest of his nation in 1940 wore a Star of David on his arm in solidarity with the country’s Jewish population. Feldman wrote his original work while sitting on a Long Island beach, listening to the “muffled noises of children and transistors and conversations of other summer people on their bath sheets.” It was these “snippets” and “things that don’t last” that he sought to reproduce, scoring the piece in graphic notation that leaves many details (even the choice of instruments) up to the performer, who is instructed to play with hands only, without mallets or sticks. This was all fertile ground for Sorey’s spontaneous creation.
For Julius Eastman also gives the performer considerable improvisational freedom. Sorey provides no dynamic markings, and the pianist chooses the rhythms and pacing. Most of the piece consists of individually struck notes and small clusters of dissonant chords, with a few repeated motifs that appear and quickly vanish. Sorey encourages the listener to appreciate and ponder pitch, timbre, color, and — perhaps most important — the fleeting nature of time. Silence is paramount, with long pauses between gestures. Summoning impressive assurance and an easy familiarity with Sorey’s stylistic intentions, Rothenberg played the piece from memory, seated at the piano under a spotlight — an arresting minimalist image in itself.
The composer, a silent but imposing presence throughout the evening, provided no commentary on For Julius Eastman either onstage or in the program. No doubt he will say more in the future. But clearly, Eastman’s courageous example and politically engaged, emotionally minimalist music have resonated deeply in Sorey’s personal and creative consciousness.
