Crier cellist and curator of Stonehenge, Michael Unterman, reflects on the inspiration behind the program.
I’m a fan of the gods of mischief, the traits of Gentle Guardian and Troublemaker being a particularly potent combination, held by many of my dearest people.
AFC’s Stonehenge is perhaps an attempt to channel that kind of spirit: not at all a serious program of serious music (at least not at face value), but more of a tap on your opposite shoulder, and hopefully one that draws your attention to something out there, maybe something simpler, and maybe also bigger.
The pieces of Stonehenge fit together a bit like a crude collage: that fifth grade art project where your teacher dropped a pile of magazines on the table and asked you to cut and paste images that, together, evoked something.
Here, first, there’s a representation of a sunrise: Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Illumine; the piece is steely, cool, and arresting; the sunrise of a sun that always hangs close to the horizon. Next, is the monument of stone: Paul Wiancko’s Vox Petra (“the voice of the rock”); not a depiction of Stonehenge, but of the abstract basalt monoliths of renowned artist and sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Then the program ends with a paean to the countryside: Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, arranged for string sextet, a version Beethoven may well have known and even played on viola, created by his contemporary Michael Fischer.
Together, the sunrise, the stone, and the landscape = a stonehenge.
Other traits in common: the music is awe-inspiring, all three pieces employing effects conjure goosebumps, and whose majestic power can elicit eye-misties. They are also all reverential, each pointing to something else that is beautiful.
I have some first hand experience of this with Paul Wiancko’s Vox Petra, as I was fortunate enough to assist in a video recording of it during my time working for Five Boroughs Music Festival in New York City. Vox Petra is a name shared by Paul Wiancko’s piece and an Isamu Noguchi sculpture, and Astoria, Queens is home to the Noguchi Museum, a converted warehouse that Noguchi himself designed to house his own artworks and the artworks of others. We recorded Vox Petra with members of the Argus Quartet and Paul himself, playing Cello 2, in a covered outdoor pavilion that houses Noguchi’s basalt giants. It was a chilly April day, chirping birds, gusts of wind, and passing cars providing both atmosphere and the occasional disruption. But we were all kids in a candy store, and nobody wanted to pass up the chance to record this piece with this backdrop. At one point, Paul walked us over to one of the sculptures and showed us how the progressive changes in texture that Noguchi’s sculptures employ served as a sort of form diagram for the piece: when the sculpture was smooth, so was the music, as when the sculpture was jagged, etc.
It was also April of 2021. We were in the process of receiving our first COVID vaccines, and digital concerts were still largely taking the place of live events. The Noguchi Museum was also operating at a heavily reduced capacity, which meant that we were able to have free run of the place (with two museum curators) for a full day and a half; a true silver lining moment of the pandemic.
Vox Petra ends with the most gentle and playful of touches: asking the players to use their bows as hammers and chisels, gently tapping on their instruments’ tailpieces, then to swipe the string gently crosswise, creating the sound of sweeping up dust. It brought the sounds of Noguchi’s one-time studio back to the now-museum, sweetly conjuring up old ghosts. I doubt any of us had ever been shattered so gently or felt so close to an artist we never knew.
Watch the performance of Vox Petra above. The video opens with an extended walk-through of the Noguchi Museum, and Paul Wiancko’s piece begins at 36:41]
