Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
A “dark environment that gradually becomes bright.” That’s how composer Erick Tapia describes “Solipsismo,” the piece he wrote that opens pianist Ann DuHamel‘s new album Prayers for a Feverish Planet: New Music about Climate Change, Vol. 1. The album resulted from the pianist’s call for piano pieces responding to climate change. It includes a handful of the 60 works DuHamel selected from the many she received from composers who responded. They contain environments both light and dark. She has performed the “Prayers for a Feverish Planet” project more than 90 times.
“Solipsismo,” as introspective as its title suggests, does indeed have a dark beginning. A broken-arpeggio motif flowers out of pauses and silences, and spreads over the keyboard. Halfway through the six-minute piece, the wandering explorations gain a steady axis of repeated notes to hang onto. Opposing statements from the bass and treble realms keep the tension high, but the final minute brings a kind of resolution.
The message-y title of “Forgive Them Not, For They Know What They Do” by Karen Lemon belies the likable shimmering quality at the start of the piece. Gradually, though, the music grows spiky and angry. An introspective and rather sluggish middle section evolves into what DuHamel describes, not inaccurately, as “a mournful, haunting hymn.” Still, the whole thing feels quite abstract to me; how the music maps to the subtitle “A lamentation on inaction against human-induced climate change” will be up to the listener.
“Air” is the the contemplative and inward-looking second movement of a work called Magic Carpet Music by Laura Schwendinger. Perhaps because it originated as an ensemble piece for flute, clarinet, violin and cello – a version with much more color variation – it feels yes, airy, but also rather skeletal.
More intriguing is “Land of Waking Dreams” by Juhi Bansal, meant to evoke a windy desert nightscape. By turns modernist, nervy, atmospheric like Debussy, and even Lisztian, it traverses a broad landscape of colors and uses extended techniques to widen the scope of the piano’s palette. Perhaps more than anywhere else on the album one gets a sense here of the pianist’s physical investment in the performance. Its 11 minutes seem to me to whistle by in a time warp.
Voices from the Frost
Icy accents at the keyboard’s far north help the patently programmatic “White Parasol” conjure up “sonic images of melting ice and overflowing riverbanks,” as composer Ian Dicke intended. Jumbles of repeated notes and glassy arpeggios fill out the picture, until a ruminative, indecisive ending leaves one hanging.
Works that incorporate organic sounds from outside the piano make some of the deepest impressions.
“frostbYte – chalk outline” by Daniel Blinkhorn powerfully evokes an Arctic coastline, from “the smallest sounds of popping and hissing as snow and ice melt, to the raucous thundering of glacial ice calving,” in the composer’s words. That’s in spite of the absence of the video that formed part of the original version of the piece. And it’s due only in part to the recorded and electroacoustic sounds integrated into the score. Those work hand-in-mittened-hand with the piano to convey the scattered, unpredictable, but relentless change that bubbles in and around glaciers and other icy (but never really “frozen”) environments.
Judith Shatin builds the four-part Plain Song around recordings of poet Charles Wright reciting some of his poems. Here again piano and electronics create a more multidimensional sound world than the album’s pure piano scores. Wright’s drily engaging vocal quality and mannerisms are reminiscent of John Prine, his words and delivery songlike the way a dust storm is songlike.
Gunter Gaupp’s “Those Who Watch” also incorporates human voices, but while its jaunty piano part engages, the recordings of statements by climate deniers and scientists give the piece an earnest, didactic ring. The best pieces on this album show that the subtler messaging of music itself has the deepest impact.
In her liner notes DuHamel quotes approvingly from the essay collection Performing Environmentalisms:
“Expressive culture becomes a resource and…a catalyst for action in settings of environmental crisis.”
In other words, art can spur action. At its best, music like that on Prayers for a Feverish Planet can have more power than the “prayers” the title suggests.
Pianist Ann DuHamel’s album is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.
