May 6, 2024
MOCA GA
Atlanta, GA – USA
“SPARK!”
Laura Usiskin, cello; Emily Koh, contrabass; Choo Choo Hu, piano; Petar Miloshevski, actor; Franny Choi, recitation. Media and technology: pre-recorded sounds and dialog, live electronics, and video.
Joao Pedro OLIVEIRA: Dark Energy
Missy MAZZOLI: Vespers
Treya NASH: Alice In Wonderland
Ryne SIESKY: ski / raept in mi:t
Howard Wershil | 13 MAY 2024
Many Atlanta arts aficionados know MOCA GA (The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia). Its open L-shaped gallery and side alleys provide a wonderful atmosphere for promenade viewing of selected works. What may not be known by Atlanta’s arts community is the ongoing collaboration between MOCA and one of Atlanta’s most innovative younger contemporary music performance groups, ensemble vim, under the acronym “SPARK!”
“SPARK!” is described by ensemble vim as “an intersectional music and art festival” intended to continue year to year, pairing musical creativity with creativity in another artistic discipline. Established earlier this year, its slogan, “ignite the spark / unite the arts,” is powerful, and we’ll have to wait and see if its results fulfill its intent—the ensemble vim concert I review here served as the kick-off event for the festival to come. Much to my surprise, this concert marked the completion of ensemble vim’s fifth season of events, free and open to the public. I had been aware of their existence for a couple of years but did not know they had graced our music scene for so long. This concert successfully celebrated the intersection between music, visuals, motion, and technology in a fashion not always addressed by other Atlanta-resident performing groups.
Their mission statement sums it up nicely:
The phrase “foster and elevate new music in Atlanta” is key to me. The pieces presented at this concert certainly furthered this goal, as I hope will their upcoming initiative for future seasons. More on that later.
Each piece presented at the evening’s concert was provided with a welcome introduction by one of the performers, offering clarity for the work about to be performed. Each piece presented contained differing applications of pre-recorded sounds and dialog, live electronics, and video, providing wonderful accompaniment and completion to each work. A grateful shoutout to Adam Mirza, Assistant Professor of Composition at Emory University, for his attention to the flawless execution of technological details needed to guarantee success.
The first composition presented was Dark Energy (2018) by Joao Pedro Oliveira, electrifyingly performed by double bass performer Emily Koh and cellist Laura Usiskin. It was an energetically bombastic piece, beginning with instrumental outbursts whose sounds were then transformed electronically into echoing gurgles, bloops, and bleeps. Throughout the piece, these performances and transformations recurred intermittently and often unexpectedly punctuating more sustained passages, creating a real sense of anticipation and drama, while the accompanying electronic responses provided seemed to become a consequence of the performers’ exuberance.
The video (which I might have titled “Exotic Energy”) was also exciting, containing swirling, competing, rapidly changing images of blues and golds, with slices of overlapping sharp and soft, all creating a plausible illusion of our universe’s dark energy. Just when you thought the piece was over, it wasn’t, then it was! To get to this point of conclusion confusion, the entire piece’s evolution could not have occurred without its excellently paced style and structure, perfectly complemented by the accompanying video.
Vespers (2014) by Missy Mazzoli changed up the concert pace just a bit, offering a cello performance combined with electronic delay, pre-recorded instrumental and electronic sounds, and pre-recorded words. The recorded and manipulated words provided to us in Laura Usiskin’s introduction to the piece significantly set the mood for it, if not for the audience (since the words are not easily discernible), then certainly for the composer: “And I need things no one can buy, and don’t even know what they want; I know I belong in this new dark age; come on all you ghosts.”
Seemingly rough sections of sound and performance transformed into quite ethereal, haunting sections of great beauty, with the back and forth of these sections asymmetrically defining the structure of the piece. The reverential art gallery setting for the concert did well in highlighting the equally reverential nature of the music being performed. At times, certain melodies suggested the quality of themes found in movies, but with so much more power, utilized so much more profoundly. Cellist Laura Usiskin gave the composition precisely the degree of reserve and solemnity it demanded; every stroke of the bow offered a reflective message and heartfelt emotion.
According to Google, “A vesper is an evening song. It also refers to evening prayers, and then it’s usually plural as vespers. Whether it’s a church service or a jazz band at sunset, if it’s in the evening, it’s a vesper.” Mmmmm. I think I like that!
Treya Nash’s Alice In Wonderland was introduced as “the true embodiment of ensemble vim’s mission to ‘ignite the spark/unite the arts’… uniting theatre, music, visual arts, and spoken word.” The introduction concluded with a quote from Lewis Carroll’s book “Alice in Wonderland,” setting the mood and amusingly suggesting that we “get on with the adventure.” The piece began with a set of ostinato patterns, accompanied by pre-recorded dialog and sound, and progressed lyrically and dramatically from there, alternating melodic passages with further, varied ostinato and bright string harmonics.
Pianist Choo Choo Hu, cellist Laura Usiskin, and contrabassist Emily Koh collaborated wonderfully to give the piece strength, contrast, depth, and substance throughout its performance, highlighting the music’s ultimate charm. Here, too, we have an engaging video, with actor Petar Miloshevski (ostensibly the “Alice” of the title) moving fluidly and expressively in front of and to the side of the video. Sometimes, the quality of the video pattern was bland enough to appear on the actor’s body unremarkably, drawing more attention to the changing shadows carved into the projected video itself. At other times, the video pattern was so stark as to offer the actor sovereignty over the pattern, drawing our interest to the relationship between the actor’s movements and the pattern’s changes.
Petar Miloshevski, as Alice in Treya Nash’s “Alice in Wonderland.” . (credit: Davida Cohen)
This video was far more calm and certainly more repetitive than the video utilized in Dark Energy. Yet the video provided here was all that was needed to convey the message and set the mood for the entire experience. Miloshevski, an award-winning London-based actor, performer, and theatre-maker, gave us an “Alice” to remember, struggling to exude to the audience the awe and wonder Alice might have experienced as she traveled through the rabbit hole and to destinations beyond.
Should you choose to follow the link to her home page (see the list of external links below), you’ll find that Treya Nash’s website is delightfully interactive. Beyond that, I’ll say no more.
At this point in the evening, ensemble vim provided more information about SPARK! and how the initiative was unfolding. This inaugural year, they sought three visual artists to pair with three composers to generate enticing results from unique and meaningful collaborations. Selections of artists were made by several individuals across the country selected for their expertise and, most importantly, their differing styles and approaches, while the composers were selected by ensemble vim using similar criteria. After that, local artists, MOCA personnel, and ensemble vim members were tasked with creating the final pairings. The results: artist Kelly Taylor Mitchell and composer Chelsea Loew; artist Martha Whittington and composer June Young (Will) Kim; artist Alan Caomin Xie and composer Ofir Klemperer.
According the the ensemble vim website: “Throughout the course of the year, these teams will be given resources to collaborate on an interdisciplinary work, culminating in sparkweek [February 7-10, 2025], where they will gather in Atlanta to rehearse with ensemble vim and put the finishing touches on their projects. The festival will culminate in a grand showcase performance of all the works.”
The final, most challenging piece on the program, Ryne Siesky’s world premiere, ski / raept in mi:t is a setting of the text to “Turing Test_Love” from Soft Science, by poet Franny Choi, who was present at the concert to recite the poem. The title, derived from a stanza in the third verse of the poem (“all humans / are cyborgs / all cyborgs / are sharp shards of sky / wrapped in meat”), is presented using idiosyncratic lettering typical of some other of his titles. The characters I have to work with here are insufficient to show the title’s truest form to the reader. (I offer the best version I can with the tools I have.)
Dr. Siesky, also present for the premiere of his piece, provided its introduction. He began by reciting a verbally distorted version of a stanza from “The Star-Spangled Banner,” thereby introducing us to the concept of auditory processing disorder, or APD, defined as “[hearing language as] the involuntary jumbling of speech.” He suggested that “as a composer, I’m in a unique position to write music that embraces the puzzle APD creates for me.” Concerning this particular composition, Ryne stated that he wanted to “set a text that was full of interesting textures, something both profound and puzzling.” At this point, he introduced us to poet Franny Choi. She shared with us that the poems Ryne set to music are poems based on the Turing Test, a method proposed in 1960 to measure a computer’s ability to fool a human into thinking that they’re talking to a real person. The poems explore the question beneath the question: How do we define who is, or is not, human?
The piece, ably performed by pianist Choo Choo Hu and cellist Laura Usiskin, is a collection of a few different contemporary and pre-contemporary styles, sometimes lyrical, sometimes distorted, sometimes sparse, sometimes flowing. At times, the poetry seemingly introduces us to the musical information; at others, the music accompanying the poetry seems to attempt to reflect its meaning. On occasion, the recorded and processed instrumental passages returned to us transformed in such a way as to suggest that they had returned to haunt us. The use of electronics and electronic manipulation in this piece was both subtle and effective, always seeming to achieve a desirable effect.
As the piece progressed, the recitation at times became so deeply processed that the words were almost unintelligible. At certain moments where the words were distorted, the music became once again lyrical, but in a more distant, eerie fashion. At one point we’re treated to a brief Rachmaninoff-Gershwin-like section of piano performance sparkle, perhaps derived from Dr. Siesky’s earlier-stated experience with jazz.
The musical language of the piece somewhat resembles a generic reference to its stylistic source, yet never homes in on details we can grasp and successfully process. In the context of this setting, the poetry yields a similar effect. As the piece progressed, the music didn’t seem to change in a fashion that accurately reflected the substance of poetry recited. I was left with a sense of continually anticipating but not receiving the satisfaction I desired. The ending was a fade-out, leaving you altogether hanging and expecting more.
What was the audience supposed to take from this perplexing musical-poetic experience? To quote Dr. Siesky’s notes as provided in ensemble vim’s program for the evening, the piece “seeks to provide incomplete answers to questions of experiential identity through pure contradiction and speculation.”
At this point, as with many a world premiere, we don’t know the future of this piece. We don’t know how time will treat it. Many pieces ultimately favored through history had equivocal beginnings. We are always privileged to be exposed to a new work whose lasting impact is yet to be determined and may yet be determined to be timeless. We should all thank Ryne, Franny, and ensemble vim for the opportunity to consider and contemplate.
We all travel a complex path toward that elusive paradigm called “truth.” Occasionally, along that path, we encounter something unexpected. My encounter with ensemble vim was like discovering a diamond in the rough. I knew I would be entertained with excellent performances and challenging musical creations, but I didn’t guess how much I would experience beyond my original expectations. I genuinely commend ensemble vim for their goals and vision, and whole-heartedly look forward to the results of their future endeavors. I can’t wait! ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- ensemble vim:: ensemblevim.org
- MOCA GA: mocaga.org
- Joao Pedro Oliveira: music.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/joao-pedro-oliveira
- Missy Mazzoli: missymazzoli.com
- Treya Nash: treyanash.com
- Petar Miloshevski: petarmiloshevski.com
- Ryne Siesky: johnsonu.edu/staff/ryne-siesky
- Franny Choi:: frannychoi.com
Read more by Howard Wershil.
.png){kind=logo}