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‘Everything changes, nothing changes’: Tyshawn Sorey wrote the string quartet that bears this title in 2018. But the sentiment is so tailor-made for the past year that when the JACK Quartet announced that they would be playing a performance of the work in December, I briefly forgot and assumed it was a first, created for these tumultuous but static times.
I should have been better informed. Mr. Sorey had enough on his plate without preparing a new quartet. The last two months of 2020 alone brought the creation of a pair of concerto-ish works, one for violin and one for cello, as well as a new iteration of “Autoschediasms”, his series of improvisations for ensemble. directed, with Alarm Will Sound.
This is not all that has happened to him since November. Mills College, where Sorey is composer in residence, released his solo piano ensemble. Opera Philadelphia filmed a black and white version of its “Cycles of My Being” song sequence, about black masculinity and racial hatred. JACK did “Everything Changes” for the Library of Congress, alongside the violin solo “For Conrad Tao”. Da Camera, of Houston, has uploaded a 2016 performance of “Black Pearl,” a tribute to Josephine Baker that Mr. Sorey arranged with soprano Julia Bullock. Her most recent album, “Unfiltered”, was released in early March, days before the lockout.
He was the composer of the year.
It’s both a coincidence – part of this flurry of work was planned a long time ago – and no. Mr Sorey has been on everyone’s radar at least since winning a MacArthur “genius” scholarship in 2017, but the shock to the performing arts since the end of winter has suddenly put him on. at the forefront as an artist at the link between the artistic and social arts of the music industry. concerns.
Undefinable, it appeals to almost everyone. He works on the blurred and productive frontier of improvised (“jazz”) and noted (“classical”) music, a composer who is also a performer. It is invaluable for ensembles and institutions because of its versatility – it can do dark solos as well as large-scale vocal works. And it is black, at a time when these ensembles and institutions are desperately seeking to belatedly address racial representation in their programming.
He’s in so much demand and has been so successful that the trolls came looking for him, dragging him to Facebook for the excess of the biography on his website. (Admittedly, it’s a bit heavy with adjective: “famous for his incomparable virtuosity, his effortless mastery”, etc.)
The style for which he is best known since his 2007 album “That / Not”, his first outing as a conductor, owes a lot to composer Morton Feldman (1926-87): sober, spacious, punctuated by ice, often silent but often disturbing, focusing the listener only on the unfolding of the music. Mr. Sorey called this vision that of an “imaginary landscape where almost nothing exists”.
There is a direct line connecting “Permutations for Solo Piano,” a 43-minute serene-resonating study on this 2007 album, and the first of two improvised solos from his recent Mills recital, filmed on an upright piano at home. Even the second solo, much shorter, more frenetic and brighter, in the end seems to want to settle back into dark shadows.
“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes”, a floating, slightly dissonant 27-minute gauze, is in this vein, as is the new work for violin and orchestra, “For Marcos Balter”, premiered on November 7 by Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Orchestra. symphonic. M. Sorey insists in a program note that this is a ‘non-certo’, without the overt virtuosity of a traditional concerto, the contrasting tempos or the lively interaction between the soloist and the ‘together.
“For Marcos Balter” is a community of regular players, more and more slow, rather than a metaphorical exchange between an individual and society. Ms. Koh’s long deliberate sounds, like cautious exhalations, collide with spectral effects on the marimba. Silent piano chords amplify silent string chords. At the end, a timpani roll is cut to sound almost like a gong, with Ms. Koh’s violin a coppery tremor above it.
It is crisp and elegant, but I prefer Mr. Sorey’s new piece for cello and orchestra, “For Roscoe Mitchell,” premiered on November 19 by Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony. There is more tension here between understated, restless minimalism and an impulse towards lushness, fullness – more tension between the soloist who steps back and speaks.
The play is less virgin than “For Marcos Balter” and more agitated. The backdrop of the ensemble is crystalline, hazy sighs, while the solo cello line develops into melancholy tunes without words; sometimes the tone is passionate, nocturnal with dark tones, sometimes ethereal lullaby. “For Roscoe Mitchell” feels like a composer challenging himself while speaking with confidence – testing the balance between introversion and extraversion, intimacy and exposure.
But it is not fair to pass it off as an outlier in this regard; Mr. Sorey’s music has never been uniquely Feldmanian stillness. In Alarm Will Sound’s very well-executed virtual performance, “Autoschediasms,” Mr. Sorey led 17 players in five states during a quiet video chat at his desk as he wrote symbols on cards and held them in front of the camera, obscure silent language that resulted in a faint hum of noise, varying in texture, then, excitingly, a spacious, oozing section marked by the sounds of lively bassoons.
And he’s not afraid to push into a kind of neo-romantic vibe. “Cycles of My Being,” featuring tenor Lawrence Brownlee and lyrics by poet Terrance Hayes, nods to the fiercely declarative mid-20th-century American art songs of Samuel Barber and Lee Hoiby, as does “Black Pearl”, near the end, a softly sad instrumental anthem by Copland.
“Cycles,” which felt turgid to me when I heard it in a version for voice and piano three years ago, has blossomed in Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of the original instrumentation, which adds some energizing strings and a moaning clarinet. . And after a year of protests, what in 2018 looked like stiffness – both in lyrics and music – now seems a more relentless force. (Opera Philadelphia presents yet another Sorey premiere, “Save the Boys,” with countertenor John Holiday on February 12.)
“Perle Noire” always strikes me as Sorey’s best. Turning Josephine Baker’s animated numbers into unresolved meditations, here is suave swing, jazzy and glacial expanse all at once, an exploration of race and identity that is ultimately indecisive – a mood of endless disappointment and endless wishes. . (“My father, how long,” Mrs. Bullock intones over and over again towards the end.)
In works this strong, the extravagant praise that some have ribbed Mr. Sorey for on social media – this biography, for one, or the JACK Quartet praising “the knife-edge precision of Sorey’s chess master’s mind »- feels justified. And, anyway, isn’t it a relief to speak of a 40-year-old composer with the immoderate enthusiasm one usually reserves for the mainstays of classical canon?
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