My music teacher, he was a composer himself, he told me... yeah, maybe you can think about becoming a composer instead of becoming just a pianist because composing is something much better than just playing piano.
—Unsuk Chin
Cello Concerto (2006-8, rev.2013)
for cello and orchestra
Duration; 30:00
One of my favorite music festivals no longer exists, Houston's Day For Night. By several accounts, its demise had much more to do with organizational personnel issues than with the content of the festival itself. Day For Night was a tasteful blend of cutting edge hip-hop, avant-garde rock, EDM, NuSoul, ambient electronic music, and immersive art installations. It was the kind of festival where Kendrick Lamar and Philip Glass felt right at home on the same bill. Holly Herndon first came to my attention at DFN. It was also where I realized that an entire generation knew about Philip Glass because of his contributions to video game soundtracks, not because they were familiar with "Einstein on the Beach." His audience had gotten younger while I had stayed the same age. (Alright, alright, alright!) That is no easy feat to pull off for a living composer who already has earned his ink in music history textbooks. It was also my first inkling that specific musical genres, once conceived of for the concert stage (or opera hall), were starting to infiltrate more popular arenas. Unsuk Chin's Xi (1998) for ensemble and electronics would have fit in perfectly, and I bet the adventurous DFN audience would have warmly received it.
While Chin is a former student of Ligeti's, I feel her linage, especially with Xi, is more closely tied to the work of Varese and Subotnick. Both were masters of coaxing musicality out of electronically produced waveforms. While Varese's masterpiece Poème électronique (1958) was written for a general concert audience at the Brussel's World Fair, most of his music was meant to be performed in concert halls for an audience expected to sit still in luxury carefully listening with undivided attention. The young upstart Nonesuch Records commissioned Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) for use by the record-buying public at home. Electronic music has avoided venue pigeonholes from the very beginning, refusing to take root in any fixed setting. When added to acoustic classical music, electronics can open doors to performance venues that Mozart would have a hard time getting on the phone. It's one reason why the loudly amplified Philip Glass Ensemble works so well in a sparse airplane hanger and has attracted a younger audience. Most electronic music uses panning and other surround sound effects as part of its fundamental musical syntax. It tends to cross specific genre and venue lines with much greater ease than even the most daring music of other 20th century composers. Unsuk Chin's music sits right in the middle of all this. Xi would have worked well at DFN attached to an immersive walkthrough warehouse art installation, a sitdown art gallery presentation, or as a concert performance. Her music’s high level of abstraction has yet to gain the attention of most mainstream music listeners, but I get the sense that the world is starting to head more in her direction.
Her music is based on a musical syntax that shares certain similarities with computer programming languages. Her initial sketches look more like code than musical notation. What comes out of those sketches has not always been warmly received by critics. One review of her production of Alice in Wonderland referred to the music as "spiky" and "scattered" with "little sense of dramatic timing." While I haven't ventured through Chin's version of the looking glass yet, I have spent some time with her extended pieces for electronics and orchestral ensemble and her instrumental concertos. It may be that her language works best in a traditional concerto setting. The structure creates a main character of sorts. It also provides a foreground/background fabric that helps anchor the music to a certain navigable familiarity that can be missing in some of Chin's other large scale works, even her other concertos. The Cello Concerto (rev. 2013), with its unusual (for her) focus on the soloist, is currently my favorite.
I'm looking forward to spending more time with Chin's music after the summer. She was one of the composers I had never listened to before, and more is necessary.