Month: February 2023

This year, Castle of our Skins is celebrating 10 years of fostering Black music and cultural exploration in the Boston area through educational initiatives and concerts. Castle of our Skins has highlighted the achievements of diverse Black artists from both past and present. As they celebrate their past decade of work, Castle of our Skins is preparing to release a debut album called “Homage: Chamber Music From Across the African Continent & Diaspora.” The album comes out on March 1 and will coincide with a series of concerts this spring. Ashleigh Gordon, the artistic and executive director of Castle of our Skins and violist on the album, spoke with Arun Rath on GBH’s All Things Considered. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: So I get a sense of what Castle of our Skins has been doing for the past 10 years, but tell us about the story behind it?

Ashleigh Gordon: So we are in our 10th year. And “we” is very much a team effort: Castle of our Skins was co-founded by myself and Anthony R. Green. We met when we were doing our masters [degree programs] at the New England Conservatory … and wanted to be able to have a platform to celebrate each other: Anthony being a fantastic composer and performer, social justice artist; myself being a violist.

And both of us being very inquisitive people, during our studies … we didn’t come across names of Black composers. And oddly enough, here in Boston, where there is such a rich history — New England Conservatory, Boston Conservatory — many, many historic as well as living composers and musicians have come through the Boston area specifically. [That] was not necessarily front and center in popular imagination and presented in curriculum, presented on stages, etc. And we found that we had an opportunity to be able to do that.

So what started as a single concert, both of us being educators also creating a single educational experience, 10 years ago has really bloomed into residencies and opportunities to engage with musicians, historical composers from over 500 years in multiple continents, all being African diasporic, commissioning projects, publications — this one certainly being our debut album — but publications as it relates to culturally responsive curriculum guides. A little bit of sky’s the limit for us to be able to again engage in ways that foster cultural curiosity and support Black artistry.

Rath: And tell us about this debut album, “Homage,” because after 10 years, I have to imagine with your first album, there’s a lot of thinking that went into what was going to go on here?

Gordon: Well, every project really starts from a conversation and relationships, so this is certainly no exception for us and the relationship being between Castle of our Skins and Dr. Samantha Ege. We met, I think it was in Boston, some years ago. She was here and at a conference when she was living in England. And Samantha is a preeminent Florence Price scholar and a scholar of largely Black women, but women composers through her own work as a scholar and as a practicing pianist.

Rath: You mentioned Florence Price who was, I only just discovered, an incredible composer who went to the New England Conservatory, right?

Gordon: Yes, she did. So roots very much deeply connected and feeling like we are being able to, as Florence Price was also very much an educator, being able to teach and share through our work and stages as well as in classrooms.

Rath: So, Florence Price is one of the composers I’m familiar with. I have to say, with one exception, Coleridge-Taylor, everyone else on this “Homage” album are composers that I was sadly unfamiliar with. You talked initially about about the difficulty of finding some of these great composers who have been here under our noses the whole time. How do you find these these artists?

Gordon: The composers on this particular album, Dr. Bongani Ndodana-Breen, we met a few years ago when he was doing a Harvard Radcliffe fellowship and thought it would be great to be able to connect and share and engage with his scholarship and certainly his music-making. And we’re able to have his “Safika,” his piano quintet on this album. Frederick C. Tillis used to teach at the University of UMass Amherst, an amazing composer who has dozens of spiritual fantasies, this one being on this particular album, his “Spiritual Fantasy No. 12.” It’s just such a colorful way to imagine the spiritual art form.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who you reference is an Afro-British composer — is also the name of my cat, for those that know my cat — but he was also a composer who very much was inspired by the sort of post-Civil War reconstruction, Black identity formation that was happening in this country and tapped into very much spirituals and folk songs, also really inspired and deeply engaged in same way with Native American plight of freedom and identity formation.

Zenobia Powell Perry, we have one existing piece of her “Homage,” which is very fitting, as the album is called that as well. And then Undine Smith Moore, who a name we may hear along with Florence Price and William Grant Still as the dean of African American composers. Undine Smith Moore was known as the dean of African American women composers, and very rightly so, as she taught over 40 years, I believe in Virginia, and created her own center for Black music research … and shared like Florence Price as an educator, shared so much knowledge and inspiration for so many generations. Her “Soweto” is very deeply rooted in those post-apartheid South African experience and again, plight for freedom.

Rath: Ashleigh, it’s been such a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you. And also as a music fan for for bringing this work out. Thank you for that.

Gordon: My pleasure.

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Larger-scale works featured in several Dark Music Days events. One of the toughest to engage with was given by Caput Ensemble, a concert marred by the yawningly awful Polo by Simon Mawhinney, a quarter of an hour’s worth of relentless, faceless, arbitrary blarney. Veronique Vaka‘s Holos was marginally more interesting, though its placid, peaceful warmth (ironic, considering the piece was inspired by glaciers) drifted too close and too often to a kind of wallpaper music. The most interesting work on the programme was Haukur Tómasson‘s Loftmynd – Air Sculptured, which was at some remove from the composer’s usual infatuation with boisterous rhythmic patterns. Instead, pianissimo, mostly unpitched formations suggested not so much the air itself as its frictional effect, creating whistles and sibilance, glissandi and tremulous tappings. Even when the music became more chordal and its dynamic expanded, Loftmynd remained elusive and unstable, ultimately evaporating into glistening wisps.

One of two concerts given by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, both conducted by Nathanaël Iselin, showcased music by Bára Gísladóttir. The twin aspects that seem to typify Bára’s music, complex drones and sonorist structures, were both strongly in evidence in Hringla, completed last year. Earlier in the work, everything was in relation to heavily accented sustained pitches, continuously coloured by tremolandos, vibrato, harmonics and trills, yet over time things became less clear. Was the fundamental pitch actually changing or only appearing to? It felt almost stupid not to be sure, yet the work’s convolution was such that certainties weren’t possible, even more so as the piece ventured ever further into a textured world including dirty brass drones, big messy octave unison surges and live electronics sufficiently subtle that it was often hard to hear where the orchestra ended and they began. The one false note in the piece was the solo double bass part performed by Bára herself, which seemed rather pointless in this context, rarely contributing anything worthwhile and not representing either a focal point or a catalyst for the orchestra or electronics.

Her 2016 work VAPE, while demonstrating many of the same qualities, proved both more conclusive and more compelling. Edgy and agitated from the outset, its sonorist approach was concerned less with blocks of material than with a continual – sometimes sudden – process of evolution. This process led to a situation where the ear was constantly being drawn to its wealth of inner detail and filigree, much of it at the cusp of tangibility, just beyond what was possible to resolve. All of it inhabited a world not merely disinterested with outdated notions of ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ but entirely separate from them. Briefly suggesting something tumultuous toward its close, VAPE instead went the other way, fizzling into nothingness; it was a superbly exciting performance.

More emotionally neutral was James Tenney‘s In a Large Open Space, performed by the combined forces of Skerpla, an ensemble based at Iceland University of the Arts, and the Bozzini Quartet. Living up to the work’s title, the players were dispersed across all four floors of the Harpa concert hall’s vast vestibule. As such, it was absolutely vital to move around, though this raised the first of many questions about what we were hearing: were the apparent changes in the make-up of Tenney’s huge floating chord due to actual changes or merely the result of moving throughout the space? Beyond this, it was fascinating to hear again the way large-scale drones seem to absorb everything, such that all sonic ephemera not part of the performance somehow became assimilated and integrated into the total musical fabric. (One of the most prevalent of these sounds, which i thought was a recurring phone ping from a surprisingly unobservant listener, turned out to be the sound of Harpa’s lifts, which themselves became a component part of Tenney’s drone.)

It was particularly impressive how, despite being constructed from disparate players arranged across four levels, the result was a translucent but cohesive sonic totality, its verticality not corresponding to a conventional low-high continuum, underdoing a steady but capricious process of adjusting, shifting, tilting and transforming of its inner structure. Though ostensibly dynamically flat, its longer-term reality was anything but, both in terms of actual or imagined small-scale fluctuations as well as the palpable sense that what we were hearing was a vibrant, living organism, flowing with vitality and lifeforce, such that nothing about it felt remotely flat.

The best large-scale music i heard at Dark Music Days 2023 came in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s first concert and one given by the Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Christian Eggen. It’s worth mentioning in passing that both events – unusually for this festival – included some truly egregious stuff. For ISO Áskell Másson, one of Iceland’s older generation composers, had decided to write a piece featuring himself playing a darabuka. Relentless, plodding, with no dynamic variation and only the most rudimentary notion of invention (despite having three other soloists at his disposal), his Capriccio was an abject failure made yet worse by the absurd sight of the composer vaguely tapping his instrument as if he’d only started learning it the previous week. Honestly, it beggared belief. The nadir of the RCO concert was Daníel Bjarnason‘s All sounds to silence come, a tedious exercise in classic Faberian cliché, sounding like the kind of thing Thomas Adès was doing back in the early 1990s, all punchy rhythms, octave-doubled spiky accents and abrupt lurches into faux-lyricism. Hackneyed, dated, superficial rubbish.

In the same concert, fairing much better, was AUX, a new bass clarinet concerto from Hugi Guðmundsson featuring soloist Rúnar Óskarsson. Though initially the relationship seemed uncertain – the bass clarinet practically driving its line through the orchestra’s volatile environment – it didn’t take long for things to turn more cantabile and playful. The soloist proved to be the instigator of ideas, which spread out and developed all around him. Far from being concerned with struggle, AUX was more interested in lyricism expressed through varying temperatures and intensities, at times becoming surprisingly weightless, as if the bass clarinet were being borne aloft on a fluttering instrumental bed. It was an unpredictable ride, though, ending up in an unexpected place of high shrillness.

By far the most outstanding orchestral music was by Ingibjörg Ýr Skarphéðinsdóttir, who was happily featured in both of these concerts. Pons papilloma, performed by ISO, displayed an edgy heat, passing through cycling surging patterns and an extensive piccolo line that brought intimacy, before becoming a wild cavalcade of intense energy. One of its most engaging aspects was its particular kind of lyricism, combining warmth with darkness.

Best of all, though, was her new work Balaena, receiving its première by RCO. Though it had at its heart inspiration of whales in oceanic depths, this was rendered as a dazzling simultaneous mix of evocation and abstraction. Its most memorable sequence came a few minutes in, when the opening granular texture (containing a myriad pitched things within) suddenly opened out into the most beautifully askew melody, made all the more haunting by its emotional complexity, simultaneously remote yet immediate, and surprisingly moving. The work was a masterclass in orchestrational ingenuity and brilliance, moving fluidly between a focus on particular ideas and dissolving into textural episodes littered with sparse fragments, sighs, chirps, drones and floating half-phrases. As spell-binding as it was just rapturously gorgeous, it made it abundantly clear that Ingibjörg is a composer deserving much wider appreciation.