Michael Hersch's "On the Threshold of Winter" Available to Stream Online

by Ted Gordon on July 21, 2020, 1:12 p.m.

“The essence of Michael Hersch’s music,” soprano Ah Young Hong reflects, “is being alone in your thoughts. To be able to have this incredibly earth-shattering silence that is screaming at you—the internal world that we have to grapple with. That is what is so unforgiving and powerful about his work.” 

Hong’s relationship to Hersch’s music is unique: beginning in 2014, she has performed the solo role of On the Threshold of Winterin three productions, the third of which she directed, across six cities in North America, and is the only singer in the world to have performed the work to date. Of the premiere, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote in the New York Times: 

"Mr. Hersch's music, for all its dark and fragile beauty, offer neither comfort nor catharsis. A traumatized silence clung to the Fishman Space auditorium after the last line sung by the soprano Ah Young Hong, the opera's blazing, lone star."

In 2015, Hong worked closely with Hersch, the chamber ensemble NUNC led by Miranda Cuckson, and director James Matthew Daniel, to produce this filmed performance of the opera, which is now available to stream. 

With what Anne Midgette called a “cold, uncompromising brilliance,”On the Threshold of Winter sets texts by Romanian poet Marin Sorescu, written during the last five weeks of his life while dying from liver cancer. Hersch’s libretto transforms those texts, which were dedicated by Sorescu “to those who suffer,” into a monodrama in two acts, in which Hong’s character is both in time and out of time, at turns raging against death and struggling to accept its inevitability. For Hong, Hersch’s instrumental writing functions to illustrate the structure of her character’s mind, at times with directly audible relationships between her voice and an instrument—always cut short, however, and prevented from reaching resolution. 

It is precisely this denial of resolution that Hong finds so powerful in Hersch’s work: it ultimately enjoins both her and her audience to experience this work alone. That isolation, however, produces a kind of rare empathy, emerging from what she calls the “dark world” of the monodrama into a shared connection and emotional release. She describes this as an exploration of the crevices and folds in one’s soul that normally remains that untouched, with Hersch’s music functioning as a liquid that seeps in, forcing a reconciliation with the pain and agony of death. Indeed, in the last moment of the work, she sings Sorescu’s words: “Terrible is the passage/ Into the fold/ Both for man/ And / Animal.”

In James Matthew Daniel’s 2015 production, Hong is joined on stage by other bodies: or, more precisely, almost-bodies of broken plaster, producing abject remnants of dust and blood. These life-size sculptures, by artist Christopher Cairns, both complicate and emphasize the isolation of Hong’s character on stage; she, too, will become abject in death. 

Indeed, watching this filmed performance in the time of COVID-19 adds another complicating fold to the power of Hersch’s work. At the time of its premiere, suffering, illness, and death were still topics that could still be largely avoided in everyday life. With the world thrust into a pandemic, Hersch’s work perhaps takes on a renewed sense of power in its confrontation with these abject experiences. For Hong, emerging from this work produces a renewed empathy for both herself and her community of family and friends, a renewed reconciliation with human mortality. 

Weekly Playlist: Alvin Singleton

by Ted Gordon on July 1, 2020, 11:17 a.m.

The music of Alvin Singleton, in the words of Kyle Gann, "glows with warmth, hovers in the air, paces itself with a glacial but palpably intuitive momentum." Coming of musical age in New York in the 1960s, Singleton emerged as a singular compositional voice, befriending fellow composer Carman Moore and attending New York University and Yale. After living and working in Europe for much of the 1970s, Singleton returned to New York where he continued to compose for orchestras, chamber ensembles, choral ensembles, and solo musicians. As Gann observes, Singleton's music often plays with speed, texture, and atmosphere, contrasting angular, frenetic voices with graceful, ethereal sections that often explore the extended range of musical instruments. 

This kind of interplay is exemplified by Singleton's 1970 work for solo cello Argoru II, which forms part of Singleton's Argoru series of compositions for solo instruments. "Argoru", in the Twi language spoken in Ghana, means "to play". As Carman Moore writes,

"In Argoru II the composer constructs a world of "strange characters" for whom he seems to have created an original language which they use to scream out, cajole, shout, mumble, and chuckle. Single powerful shots alternate with long phrase ultra-soft scramblings. This is the theatre of sound."

Another standout work in the Argoru series is Argoru V/a, for bass clarinet, composed in 1978 for Harry Sparnaay and later revised in 2011. In an interview with the jazz pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, Iverson hears a resonance between this work and the soloing style of Eric Dolphy—one of the few Jazz greats that Singleton missed meeting at the Five Spot in the 1960s.

The breadth of Singleton's compositional imagination can be heard in his 1978 work for solo harpischord, Le Tombeau du Petit Prince. Dedicated to the eponymous protagonist of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's novella, this work was motivated by Singleton's desire to compose his music that "speaks equally to the humanity of all its listeners." 

We'll end this composer playlist with Singleton's 2011 work for solo piano, In My Own Skin, whose title, to Carman Moore, "lets us know clearly where the composer is comfortable." But "Within that skin," as Moore notes, "are two competing sonic worlds." One graceful, glacial, almost chorale-like; the other "wild and quicksilver, both in tempo and rhythmic variety."

Weekly Playlist: Ann Cleare

by Ted Gordon on May 22, 2020, 2:01 p.m.

This week we're turning our ears to the music of Ann Cleare, a composer whose work explores new possibilities in instrumental, natural, musical, and experimental sound. Cleare works in concert music, opera, extended sonic environments, and hybrid instrumental design, often collaborating with performers to develop new modifications and techniques that probe the boundaries of musical performance. 

1. I should live in wires for leaving you behind, Cleare's 2014 work for piano (two players) and percussion, evokes what the composer calls a "ball of wire": a "mammoth, tangled, metallic motion that spins relentlessly":

2. Dorchadas, Cleare's 2007 work for ensemble which takes its title from the Irish word for "darkness", here performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble:

3. Moil, Cleare's 2010 string quartet, which the composer describes in her program note as "of brittleness, of memory, of shards, of light, of changing, of seismology":

4. i am not a clockmaker either, Cleare's 2009 work for accordion and electronics, which "sets into motion a physical force which dissects the instrument into acute shards or material and reconstitutes it in a completely restructured manner."