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Stories   >   Apollo Chamber Players innovate by evolving a connection between existing genres / SFCV

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Apollo Chamber Players innovate by evolving a connection between existing genres / SFCV

Posted: September 19, 2021

San Francisco Classical Voice -  Tamzin Elliott writes…. Artists often innovate by evolving a connection between existing genres. That’s a risky business, however, as three recent albums show. All of them sent flares up over the borderlands between contemporary classical music and the rest of the musical world. While this is not an unusual occurrence, these albums piqued my interest for both their fumbles and their successes. They are emblematic of the rocky history of cross-genre work involving musicians of classical background — a history of inventiveness, good intentions, and bad oversights.

Many classically trained musicians and composers want to be involved in music outside of notated concert music simply because most musicians love a lot of different music. And as people from this “classical” side find their ways to become involved in “popular” genres, calling this new music “contemporary classical” feels less and less fitting.  It is equally hard to tell if the boundary is being pushed from the classical side to contain new hybridizations — claiming space within another genre or practice — or if the salt circle is truly being smudged or rubbed out entirely.

Earlier this month, Apollo Chamber Players brought together pieces under the umbrella of being “globally influenced” by some kind of emphasis on folk music. The result is their new album With Malice Toward None, featuring Pamela Z, J. Kimo Williams, Christopher Theofanidis with Mark Wingate, and Eve Belgarian.

With Malice Toward None has many different approaches to the prompt “globally-inspired” music, including not responding to the prompt at all in the case of Theofanidis and Wingate; their piece cracks open Samuel Beckett’s What is the Word? Despite this variety, largely these composers’ response to “folk” music is within the realm of more standard western compositional processes.

Closest to the “translational” side of the spectrum is a set folk song string arrangements by renowned Armenian composer Komitas (1891 – 1915), followed by Eve Beglarian’s We Will Sing One Song, an imagining of a scene from Armenian-American writer William Saroyan’s novel The Human Comedy. Belgarian and J. Kimo Williams both fold in music from outside the Western Classical sphere via the inclusion of particular practitioners — Arsen Petrosyan on duduk and Pejman Hadadi on Armenian percussion, and, in Williams’s titular With Malice Toward None, the electronic violin wailer Tracy Silverman.

This is probably the most common form of cross-genre concert music from the past 30 or so years — by working directly with a musician from another genre or folk tradition, composers set up a personal frame to showcase, comment on, at best exchange with, and at worst “other” another kind of music within the comfortable home grounds of concert music. Belgarian’s and Williams’s pieces feel like a versatile but united work of art: Williams gave off thorough, personal authenticity in this piece, probably due to his own long experience as a rock guitarist in the 1960s and ’70s.  

Both Pamela Z and Williams drew from the folk music of their lives, largely rock and American folk music from that 1960s and ’70s era. I love their music because it simultaneously fits the brief they were given and questions the kind of boundary that the phrase “globally inspired” unwittingly erects.

Pamela Z’s music always cuts through the noise because it sounds interested. When listening to her work we are listening to the playing out of her interest in a topic, a sound, a parameter of technology, and because her interest is so clear we are interested. In The Unravelling she brings her Z magnifying glass to her history with American folk. She transforms the lonely chestnut “500 Miles,” popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary, into timeless spiraling she describes as “a broken record.” The effect is a new kind of loneliness, in a cosmic, drifting-from-the-space-shuttle kind of way. Perhaps, Z has turned her gaze to the time that has passed since she sang the song busking with her friends in San Francisco.

And maybe we hear some of the generational disappointment in the unfulfilled promises of the ’60s in her movement “Microbus.” She describes this track as “whimsical,” which doesn’t account for the sweet sadness I hear. It was her reality then, driving up and down the California coast with her friends, busking and singing “all the words,” believing “all the words,” even if it wasn’t realistic once the dust cleared.

Again, looking at these albums we find these tie-downs, or maybe snags, that connect the fabric of music in the United States to the hard-fought Civil Rights movements. Maybe this has to do with the solidification of the modern recording industry (which is experiencing a reliquification at this moment) that occurred back then. But it also has to do with the effect that these post-colonial movements had on American culture, including fundamentally changing the production of music by Americans.   Credit: Katy Cartland / Donald Swearingen

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