A Zen Evening at the Freer
Tawaraya Sotatsu, Imperial Anthology, Kokinshu, early 17th century, handscroll; ink, gold, silver, and mica on paper, image courtesy of Freer Gallery of Art
The best concerts on the Bill and Mary Meyer Concert Series of free concerts at the Freer Gallery of Art explore the intersection of European and non-Western music. Last night's program, performed by the Leipzig String Quartet, did just that by combining music by three of Asia's most important composers, all experimenting with the sounds of the European 20th century avant-garde, with that of an American composer, John Cage, fascinated by Zen philosophy.
The group brought an etched clarity and multicolored approach to the two Japanese works that opened the first half, the third string quartet by Toshio Hosokawa (Silent Flowers, 1998) and Tōru Takemitsu's In a Landscape, from 1961. The former composer has succeeded the latter as Japan's leading voice in contemporary music, and both compositions refract modern atonal techniques through the lens of Japanese arts, Ikebana (floral art), noh theater, poetic calligraphy, and gagaku (the music of Japan's imperial court). In both works the composers build up clusters of sound through glissandi, harmonics, pitchless scrapes, and other unusual string techniques, exploding from pizzicati or other percussive sounds, which then recede slowly to silence. Listening to them was mostly a thankless task, quite frankly, until a totally unexpected sonority blossomed out of the nothingness, like the strands of harmonic-filled clusters that evaporate into the high altitude at the end of the Hosokawa work.
Many of the same qualities came through in Tan Dun's Eight Colors for String Quartet, a suite of miniatures in which Dun combined the Chinese folk music sounds of his youth during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the atonal modernism he encountered after moving to New York in the 1980s. He has been one of the more commercially successful composers in recent years, at least in part because he found a way to incorporate music with some sort of regular, perceptible pulse into music known for often inscrutable, overly serialized rhythm. Dun has had great success as a composer of film music, and the best movements here were vignettes of bright colors, like the drooping-sigh motifs of Pink Actress, the Stravinsky-like syncopations of Zen, and the percussive frenzy of Drum and Gong.
Violist Ivo Bauer, Freer Gallery of Art, photo by Neil Greentree
The performers instructed the audience to move about the entire floor, to hear the music from different angles, and the resulting noise of shuffling feet, cameras clicking, and whispering became, in good Cagean tradition, part of the performance. The sound carried throughout the stone-floored exhibition space, allowing one to stroll about taking in the Freer's exquisite collection of Chinese landscapes of wandering philosophers, Japanese screens and guardian statues, Buddhist statues, calligraphy, and pottery, with the formless blocks of sound, streaked pen-like into the space and then vanishing, providing a sonic backdrop. The group opted to use the longest version of the possible combinations of the melodic fragments, timing the 30 minutes of performance, not with stopwatches as Cage indicated, but on their iPhones. It was, as Jon Stewart might put it, a moment of Zen.
The next free concert at the Freer Gallery of Art, on Friday evening (March 13, 7:30 p.m.), will feature Japanese composers mixing together music played on violin and the traditional shamisen with computers and interactive technology.