Collision Point Reviewed in Fanfare

 

 

SUSMAN Camille. Clouds and Flames. Motions of Return. The Starry Dynamo ● Piccola Academia degli Specchi ● BELARCA 007 (47:01)

On the face of it this album of chamber works by the accomplished Chicago-born composer/pianist William Susman is very accessible, delivering ingenious variations on Minimalism’s familiar techniques from a confident and fertile musical imagination. But bit of exploration into Susmnn’s biography reveals an intriguing story, a capsule history, in fact, of where modern American music has traveled over the past decades.

Born in 1960, Susman studied both classical and jazz piano. He is probably the only performer who learned from both a student of Artur Schnabel’s (Pauline Lindsey) and a pianist with Louis Armstrong (Steve Behr). He founded his own jazz ensemble when he was 13 and later performed with big bands and Afro-Cuban groups. That’s merely the beginning of a complex web of influences that led him to gravitate toward Xenakis and Ligeti in the Eighties. At 25 he enjoyed a major breakthrough by becoming the youngest composer to be awarded a commission from Harvard’s prestigious Fromm Foundation. There were graduate studies in computer-generated music at Stanford and an invitation from Pierre Boulez to engage with IRCAM in Paris.

For a composer rooted in the European avant garde, using arcane methods based, for example, on Fibonacci sequences to generate rhythmic repetitions, his eventual encounter with American Minimalism came as an “aesthetic shock” and a kind of spiritual awakening. In a booklet note Susman relates that “The way Riley, Reich, and Glass incorporated the things they liked—Indian or African influences, for example into their music led me to think about the things I knew and admired.”

As listeners we are so accustomed to following our personal tastes that it might be hard to relate to a young composer tightly identified with mid-century Modernism (and receiving commissions and praise for adhering to that idiom), but Susman’s awakening moment was a kind of liberation. In a much publicized shift, another arch Modernist, the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, had a similar conversion to Minimalism as a composer.

In none of these cases does the shift represent a move from complexity to simplicity. No one could be more theoretical than Glass or more steeped in the Modernist styles he rejected. The hidden texture inside today’s Minimalism consists of personal and private influences being brought to bear. For Susman, his style today is inspired by Afro- Cuban montuño, medieval hocket and isorhythm from the École de Notre-Dame de Paris, and jazz.

I’ve gone into these facets out of fascination but also to illustrate how these four chamber works came about—you couldn’t guess it by ear alone. The instrumentation varies from a duo for flute and piano (Motions of Return) to a standard piano trio with violin and cello (Clouds and Flames), with a sextet, Camille, and quintet, The Starry Dynamo, that call upon the largest complement of the Rome-based ensemble, Piccola Academia degli Specchi (Little Academy of Mirrors), which is flute, alto saxophone, violin, cello, and two pianists (they play four-hand in Camille). While listening to Camille, which opens the program, I thought that Susman should consider writing film scores, because he uses Minimalism to express a range of feelings that can be unusually tender or bold. My impression was justified, as I discovered later, because Susman has composed a number of award-wining film scores.

Needless to say, Minimalism has evolved into more than one thing, and for me, Susman’s version is appealing because it isn’t mechanical and the harmonic shifts don’t occur with glacial slowness. This is quick-witted music guided as much by emotional change as rhythmic and harmonic modulations. The flute and piano duo, Motions of Return, is necessarily fairly monochromatic, so here the focus is on rhythmic changes that might well be mathematically based. The quintet and sextet, since they use piano and alto sax, are more colorful and jazzy, I’d say, although Susman is capable of considerable surprise and unpredictability.

In all, I recommend this release to fans of Minimalism and more broadly to general listeners interested in an intriguing American voice. The performances are energetic and committed, the recorded sound excellent.

Huntley Dent

Four stars: An enjoyable and original version of today’s Minimalism

Fanfare Magazine, March-April 2020 Issue

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Camille on Relevant Tones

Chicago new music radio show on WFMT Classical 98.7 FM hosted by Seth Boustead

The past few years, composer, pianist and Access Contemporary Music founder Seth Boustead has been hosting the show Relevant Tones on the classical station WFMT 98.7 FM in Chicago. Seth’s brilliant vision of a new music radio show in Chicago has grown from local to national and now international syndication.

Vitality from the piece CAMILLE was broadcast twice but with different ensembles and instrumentation.

Click on the links below to take you to Relevant Tones and listen to CAMILLE and a wide variety of music:

MODERN DAY MOONLIGHTERS

CAMILLE: Vitality performed by Piccola Accademia degli Specchi (flute, saxophone, violin, cello, piano 4-hands)

CD GRAB BAG 

CAMILLE: Vitality performed by OCTET Ensemble (saxophone, trumpet, trombone, double bass, drums, piano, electric piano, vocals)

The Poetry of Sue Susman

I am drawn to my sister’s poems because they tell honest and flowing stories. They are truthful and insightful narratives about things we see or ought to see.

Recently, I asked Sue to talk a little about her poems sung on the album Scatter My Ashes. You can download the  album booklet  which includes the poems heard in the two song cycles. -William Susman

“I wrote Scatter My Ashes when I was standing on a street corner handing out leaflets for a political candidate.  No one was around, so I had nothing to do.  I wrote this poem on the back of one of the leaflets.  It just came to me.

With Hot Time, I did have some inspiration.  Some friends and I had just come out of a movie theater.  We were on Clark and Division, an area in Chicago where there a lot of bars.  The whole poem is a description of the way I experience bars.  The “hot dark rooms filled with sweating, hungry bodies, dancing with fever into the morning.” “You can choose one to take home with you,”  is about “one night stands, people picking up strangers in bars and taking them home. “You can go on alone” is the choice not to pick someone up and just go home yourself.   “You can help yourself” has a double meaning—“You can help yourself” to the many people around you to take home with you or you can “help yourself”, as in you can take care of yourself and not need another person to do it.

In Begging the Night For Change, I was in a parking lot and a woman came up to me and asked me for money.  “I said, ‘No’ and walked away.”  I wrote the poem afterwards.  It was a real experience.

In Moving In To An Empty Space,  I was on a personal retreat, staying in a cabin in St. Charles, IL.  I went there fairly often when I was in graduate school.  I spent some of the time writing and some of the time just taking long walks.  I didn’t see anybody for most of the time.  That’s what I came there for, silence and peace.  I wrote “Moving In To An Empty Space” after standing outside in the cold.  It was winter then. I was looking up at the night sky filled with stars.  There was no sound and the words just came to me and I wrote the poem.” -Sue Susman