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THE UNIQUE VOICE OF SEBASTIAN CURRIER SOME OF THIS COMPOSER’S MOST ARRESTING CHAMBER WORKS INHABIT AN AMBIGUOUS TERRITORY WHERE STASIS MEETS FRENZY, NOISE TRANSFORMS ITSELF INTO MUSIC, AND WHERE THE COMPOSITIONAL VANTAGE POINT IS ALWAYS SHIFTING. by Michael Boriskin

lmost as soon as Kentucky indus- This year, for the first time, the Festival in Providence back in the mid- trialist and philanthropist H. Grawemeyer Award was conferred on a 1970s, I performed with a variety of won- ACharles Grawemeyer established a traditionally scored chamber work: Static, derful artists for several summers, includ- prize in the mid-1980s “in recognition of for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, ing a scholarly, affable violist named outstanding achievement by a living com- by American composer Sebastian Currier. Robert Currier. It turned out that Bob poser in a large musical genre,” the award It is appropriate that the 48-year-old headed a rather unusual family entirely bearing his name gained widespread atten- Currier has been recognized for a compo- made up professional or aspiring musi- tion. The first, in 1985, went to the stun- sition for a small ensemble. Though he has cians. (One can only imagine conversa- ning new Symphony No. 3 by the widely produced important and compelling tions at their dinner table!) Bob’s wife, esteemed Witold Lutoslawski. Even more pieces for orchestra, chorus, voice, and Marilyn, was an accomplished composer, important in capturing the world’s atten- individual instruments, chamber music and the couple’s two teenage sons, tion was the cash prize of $150,000—a has stood at the heart of his work. For Sebastian and Nathan, were obsessed with generous amount today, but even more twenty years, he has been inventing won- guitars and rock music. “My brother and I eye-popping back in 1985—placing it drously intriguing, invigorating, and mys- drove our neighbors to despair with our among the elite of international music terious musical creations for small instru- take on Black Sabbath and other heavy prizes. (The award has since been mental groups. These include works for metal bands,” Sebastian recalled at a recent increased to $200,000.) Over the years, mixed ensembles with and without voice, discussion with music students, faculty, the Grawemeyer Award has solidified its string quartets, and an assortment of duos and visitors at the University of Louisville, reputation through highly discriminating (violin and piano, cello and piano, flute where the Grawemeyer Awards program is choices, which included major composi- and piano, violin and harp). As Currier based. “I was obsessed with rock and roll, tions by Györgi Ligeti, Pierre Boulez, Toru explained in a National Public Radio but discovered something deeper while lis- Takemitsu, György Kurtág, Krzysztof interview that followed the award’s tening to my parents’ recordings of classi- Penderecki, John Corigliano, John Adams, announcement in March, “Chamber cal music. Rock songs begin and end, but Joan Tower, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Kaija music is very important to me, because of the variety of sound, breadth, and emotion Saariaho, as well as by younger composers its intimacy, the nature of performance, in classical music is a journey.” like Tan Dun, Thomas Adès, and Unsuk and the interacting of performers. It’s so By the time I really got to know Chin. All were honored for large orchestral much more personal than an orchestra. Sebastian, he had already exchanged amps works or operas (except Ligeti’s landmark You have a chance to shape things and and metal strings for the composing table, Piano Études and Boulez’s Sur Incises, the think things out in a more nuanced way— and had been writing for a while. He was latter hardly a chamber work with its idio- and there’s also more freedom in terms of completing in his studies at Juilliard with syncratic instrumentation for three performance.” Milton Babbitt, and the first piece of his I pianists, three harpists, and three percus- My own musical journey with Currier’s had ever seen was a Partita from the 1980s sionists playing an enormous battery of music began over two decades ago. for solo piano. I’m not sure whether or not instruments, and requiring a conductor). Helping to start the Rhode Island Music he still owns up to this youthful work, but

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it struck me then (as now) as an invigorat- Over the next dozen years or so, Currier Meet the Composer’s Commissioning pieces he so often creates. (Charles unexpectedly interrupted by a frenzied ing, impressively assured piece—all the and his catalog continued to grow. It was Music/USA program helped make this Rosen’s insightful observation about passage that ends as abruptly as it began, more so coming from a novice composer always an adventure to get to know his lat- happen, and we will always be indebted to the miniature works of Schoenberg, leaving the still (static) chord in its wake. in his mid-20s. When I subsequently per- est works, and I continued to perform a this invaluable organization for enhancing Webern, and Berg is also pertinent Affecting, long-lined string melodies in formed the Partita, I worked with the number of them. With the formation of this collaboration. The resulting work was to much of Currier’s work: these the fourth movement (“resonant”) soar young composer and was struck by how Music from Copland House, in 1999, my Static—written for Music from Copland compressed forms “do not diminish above the irregular, unpatterned back- professional and articulate he was. Like a ensemble colleagues and I were in a posi- House’s core instrumentation of flute, clar- the emotions they express but ground static in the piano. The work seasoned veteran, he knew precisely where tion to more actively champion his work. inet, violin, cello, and piano. Following our enlarge them, as if fragments of feel- reaches a sustained zenith of intensity in everything came from, what he wanted Having performed several of his composi- world-premiere performance in early 2005 ing were blown up by a powerful the fifth movement (“charged”), before the from a performance, and how to gently tions on various occasions, it was natural at New York’s Miller Theatre, we recorded microscope.”) finale (“floating”) recapitulates material but firmly persuade a performer to do for us to think of commissioning him to Static (and three other chamber works) for Currier values the intelligence of from the previous movements, as what what he was asking for. write a piece for us. A generous grant from an all-Currier CD called On the Verge for his listeners and neither panders to Currier calls “disembodied fragments of Koch International Classics, which nor alienates them. His work is memory that float by, emerging out of an released it this past spring. exquisitely detailed, and combines ethereal static.” SELECTED CHAMBER WORKS OF SEBASTIAN CURRIER* In so many ways, Static embodies the atmospheric and the rigorous. Static also explores the frontier where QUARTETS AND MIXED ENSEMBLES VOCALISSIMUS (1991) Soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, Currier’s musical approach. Describing his Melodies tend to be epigrammatic. sound becomes music, and vice-versa, and cello, piano, percussion 32’ exhilarating violin-clarinet-piano trio The instrumental virtuosity called seems at times to question (perhaps even BROKEN CONSORT (1996) Flute, oboe, violin, cello, Eighteen settings of Wallace Stevens’s poem “To the two guitars 14’ Verge, Currier writes, “The idea of being on for is of a more subtle kind, rather reassign) some of the attributes of each. Roaring Wind” examine the interaction between music the verge of extremity but not crossing it is than overt razzle-dazzle. Composer- Each movement grows out of ethereal, Playing on the Renaissance term for an ensemble of and words from various compositional points of view. diverse instruments, the one-movement piece veers appealing to me. It seems like an ideal place critic David Cleary has described seemingly unmeasured, and at first indis- back and forth between mechanical order and uncon- WHISPERS (1996) Flute, cello, piano, percussion 13’ to be, both in life and art.” Indeed, most of Currier’s music as “polished without tinct sounds, imparting an ominous char- trolled chaos, resolving calmly and lyrically. In tones suggesting human voices, quick, accented whispers dominate an urgent central section, which is Currier’s music, like Static and Verge, jour- being glib, lucid without being acter to the whole. Moments abound NIGHTMAZE (2005) Flute, clarinet, trumpet, violin, framed by episodes of repose and quietude. neys inquisitively and in various intriguing empty, and substantial without being when resonant gusts of air or tiny flecks of cello, double bass, piano, digital keyboard, percussion, ways around this border region, inhabiting forbidding … fluid stuff that tanta- sound grow into pitched melodic kernels, narrator, video projections, 4-channel electronics 45’ DUOS This multimedia piece is based on a text by Thomas AERIALISM (2004) Cello and piano 20’ a world of ambiguities, shifting perspec- lizes the ear.” or, conversely, when thematic fragments or Bolt, in which a college student exhausted by exams AFTERSONG (1993) Violin and piano 14’ tives, and multiple meanings. He revels in The Curriers in the 1980s: Nathan (standing), All of the foregoing describes the chordal passages disintegrate into barely falls into a deep sleep, and—his mind filled with half- CLOCKWORK (1989) Violin and piano 18’ the tension and energy created by bringing Sebastian, Marilyn and Robert Grawemeyer Award-winning Static, recognizable wisps of sound. understood ideas—dreams or hallucinates about ENTANGLEMENT (1992) Violin and piano 26’ together and exploring opposites. a major work both in scale and Sebastian Currier has been well reward- FRAMES (1998) Cello and piano 23’ speeding along a dark highway with road signs point- Refusing to be constrained by a single content. Currier has called the title ed with the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, a ing to exits into remote corners of his psyche. INTIMATIONS (1989) Clarinet and piano 12’ NIGHT TIME (1998) Violin and harp 14’ aesthetic stance, Currier often conceives from that many varied perspectives. His “some sort of Rorschach’s test.” Does it Guggenheim Fellowship, honors and QUARTETSET (1995) String quartet 36’ PULSE (2002) Viola and guitar 16’ and then treats his material from diverse violin-and-piano duo Entanglement refer to something immobile and grants from the American Academy of QUIET TIME (2004) String quartet 23’ UNCERTAINTIES (1993) Viola and piano 17’ Companion pieces that can be performed separately, vantage points. Theo’s Sketchbook, for solo approaches the same basic material from unchanging, or to a chaotic, unpre- Arts and Letters, the National Endow- VARIATIONS ON “TIME AND TIME AGAIN” (2000) piano, traces the entire life of a fictitious the differing perspectives of the two dictable, and distracting energy? The ment for the Arts, the Koussevitzky the works pay homage to the great quartet tradition of Flute and piano 9’ Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, while constantly sub- composer, using fragments from an imagi- instruments. His works challenge the lis- music suggests both meanings of the term. Foundation, and many others. It is to be verting it through interpolations employing contempo- *Works available from Carl Fischer, Inc. nary musical journal ranging from tener to reconsider generally accepted con- The work opens onto what Currier hoped that the Grawemeyer Award will rary language, timbre, and other devices. SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY Juvenilia through Youth and Mature Works cepts and boundaries of time, sound, con- describes as an inert, interior landscape (in bring even wider recognition and acclaim REMIX (2005) Flute, clarinet, horn, harp, violin, viola, ON THE VERGE Static, Verge, Night Time, Variations on to The Last Year. Quartetset giddily text, character, narrative, and structure, as the movement titled “remote”), with the to a composer whom those of us who have cello, double bass, percussion, piano, pre-recorded on “Time and Time Again” careens across stylistic borders. Verge is well as the very nature of artistic creativity. slow, wavelike chords that are heard or felt known and performed his music over the electronics 15’ Music from Copland House An extended antiphon of two alternating instrumental inspired by the implication of Robert Currier’s work simultaneously explores and in almost every one of the work’s six move- years have long regarded as one of (Koch KIC-CD-77691) groups, using instruments and material inspired by Schumann’s curiously titled little piano re-positions music’s traditional confines. ments. In the second movement (called America’s finest and most quirkily imagi- Brahms’s Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano. Musical QUARTETSET AND QUIET TIME piece Fast zu Ernst (“Almost Too Serious”), The urgency and dynamism of Currier’s “ethereal”), hints of the other kind of “stat- native creative voices. ideas are echoed, answered, and elaborated upon by Cassatt Quartet and dangerously explores the edge of compositions grow out of a rich, pungent ic” emerge. “This musical ‘interference’,” the remaining instruments and electronic samples. (New World 80634-2) extremities of speed, intensity, cohesive- musical vocabulary that perhaps owes Currier has explained, “takes several forms, STATIC (2003) Flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano 27’ Vocalissimus, Theo's Sketchbook, Whispers ness, and inaudibility. In his stunning something to the highly evolved post- but one of the most characteristic is where Pianist Michael Boriskin has performed in Full discussion of the Grawemeyer prize-winning piece Mosaic Ensemble orchestral work Microsymph, Currier com- tonal harmonic language of one of his string trills are played in harmonics, paired more than thirty countries and written for is within the main article. (New World 80527-2) poses a full, five-movement symphony but other main teachers, the superlative with changes in bow pressure and place- Chamber Music, Symphony, Stagebill, VERGE (1997) Violin, cello, piano 17’ Intimations compresses it into a mere 10 minutes. His George Perle—though with an even more ment, which causes various harmonics to American Record Guide, and many other Perhaps Currier’s most-often performed chamber work, IN SPONTANEOUS LINES: 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN Verge explores aesthetic boundaries via nine movements MUSIC FOR CLARINET AND PIANO Vocalissimus for voice and small chamber propulsive rhythmic energy. Indeed, the stand out in a constantly changing and publications. He is artistic and executive lying at the edge of excess—with such titles as “Almost Nathan Williams, clarinet; Audrey Andrist, piano ensemble reinterprets one 13-word electricity and mystery in Currier’s music random fashion.” The juxtaposition is director of Copland House, in New York, Too Fast,” “Almost Too Much,” “Almost Too Fractured.” (Albany TROY311) Wallace Stevens poem 18 different ways, seem only to be heightened by being con- most stark in the third movement (“bi- and a founding artist of the Music from as if set by that many different composers densed into the short movements and polar”), with a long-held motionless chord Copland House ensemble.

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