Small Chamber | whitney-george

Among those who make a habit of keeping company with the distant past, few discoveries are cherished more fervently than testaments to suffering. The unearthing of this work has reminded us of why this is so. Well-documented historical figures are not permitted the dignity of death, but rather are imagined to be our eternal companions, and thus their discontent is not permitted the dignity of mystery. But when suffering presents itself as an artifact without the encumbrance of a story, its particular effect on our imagination is something we cannot afford to neglect. To understand what draws us to it is, in fact, a moral necessity.

Through the lens of Dante, Inferno: The Nine Circles of Suffering casts the experience of strife as a populated landscape, starkly contrasting the musical material of environments with that of their appointed stewards. In the former, the full force of the quartet gives us elemental brutality— relentless winds whose eternal playthings are the frustrated souls of the lustful; the searing heat of the Inner Ring of Violence, where specks of flame fall as needle-like pizzicato; the counterpoint that soars with ritual solemnity over the fearfully imposing stone pits of the Eighth Circle. These grand structures are contrasted with the more intimate encounters with hell’s guardians, where improvisatory melodic lines assign theatrical character to Minos, Cerberus, Minotaur, and Geryon. Cruelty is thus ever-present while continually changing its shape.

Within this grotesquery, however, there is something tenderly empathetic in the way these sounds unravel suffering to reveal its myriad forms. It is as if the composer sought to affirm that the inhabitants of hell had not been forgotten, offering as tribute a narrative account of the soul’s unrest. Hell is presented as an unjust place, where punishment and crime are so hopelessly lost to one another, that all that remains for us to comprehend is the anguish of those imprisoned there. We cannot condemn the mournful violins of the Second Circle for their indiscretions; what divine jurisprudence deemed lust was, to a human being, nothing more than sincerity.

Inferno leaves us with a coda, whose title alludes to the moment at which Dante and Virgil emerge to behold an early morning sky still teeming with stars. The movement is saturated with familiar material, but its character is unmistakably that of the opening, Limbo. Perhaps this is to temper our relief; the night sky is quieter than hell, but its silent inhabitants are as remote as the souls of the dead. Any gesture we offer toward them must end unfinished, frozen as a tribute that is, at best, a surrogate for comfort.

If we are inclined to relish the beauty of such things, we ought also to remember that this is because the dead are strangers to us. This composer, lost to history for so many generations, is a stranger to us. We cannot comfort them because they no longer suffer, but we listen and imagine that time is no object. This is a necessary rite, but it is all too easy for it to become tragedy when it takes full possession of our hearts. If this music kindles in us a need to ease the sorrow, real or imagined, of the one who wrote it, let us not forget the blessing bestowed uniquely upon the living: We are not condemned to be strangers to one another.

Veiled

for string quartet

Circles

for piano 4-hands or percussion quartet

The thematic material that pervades Circles emerged initially in a piano score for a wind ensemble piece which California State University, Chico commissioned from me in the summer of 2005. (Perhaps, as an aside, I offer this experience to my composition students: never write a piano score and then orchestrate it—always write for the instruments you intend to perform your piece). Unsatisfied with the end result, I have looked back to this piece ever since, trying out this material in other works. At least 50% of the material in the original has been scrapped for being tedious, boring, predictable, or otherwise trite. Yet the central thread has remained intact, and perhaps strengthened. While the original is more rhythmically regular than most of my current work (where time signatures may literally change by the measure), my fascination with rhythmic layering began in this piece.

After the timbral exploration of disintegrating clusters in the low range of the ensemble which opens the piece, the main theme emerges. A drone-note slowly expands in intervalic space, reaching a climax before collapsing in upon itself. The quarter-note triplet motive, which saturates the reminder of the piece, is also revealed in this introduction, and gains momentum as this rhythmic idea traverses the range of the ensemble into the stratosphere. What follows is a playful interaction of two simple polyrhythms: two-against three and three-against-four. Intermittently the ominous opening material collides against these polyrhythms. In the largest sense, the piece is a simple A-B-A form, and these circular qualities to the piece emerge in both large and small scale forms, in rhythmic contexts, and in thematic pitch material.

selections from Night, like velvet: in twelve letters

for mixed ensembles

Night, like velvet: in twelve letters is an interdisciplinary work in twelve movements. George began the project in January 2013, constraining herself to write one movement during each month throughout the year. Each movement was written as a musical letter to someone in George’s life. The instrumentation takes into account the makeup of her ensemble (the Curiosity Cabinet), the dedicatee(s) of each movement, and her desire to include differentiated timbral combinations throughout the cycle. Mirroring the non-linear nature of memory, Night’s monthly letters can be performed in various orders, each of which brings out different structural and expressive relationships. Thus, though a full performance of the work could imply a linear narrative, the cycle remains multivalent, providing a range of affective suggestions.

A selection of poetry or prose from Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes accompanies each movement. Though George chose texts from different periods of each writer’s life—some when they were romantically involved and some not—she maintains a thematic focus on displacements of time, fragmentation rather than cohesion, and the alternately amorous and strained meanderings of communication between lovers. In the composer’s full score (which is delightfully colorful due to her penchant for highlighting meter changes), as well as in each instrumentalist’s part, lines or words of the selected texts are correlated with specific musical moments. In a sense, these texts are a silent continuo part being juxtaposed with the music, but they are only “heard” through realization by the reader/listener.

Evoking the productive tension between process and product, George’s Night is a fragmented yet loosely programmatic reflection of creative life of its composer and nostalgic meditation on the passing time.

Rope at the Throat

for flute, violin, 'cello, & percussion

a Compass as My Planchette

for voice & vibraphone

Cracked Looking Glass

for violin & 'cello

Still & Brimming—Mirror

for flute, clarinet, violin, 'cello, & percussion

In Green Water

for flute, clarinet, violin, 'cello, piano & percussion

Watching the Dark Slowly Unfold

for oboe/english horn, violin, viola, 'cello, piano

Stained Glass

a multi-movement work

for flute, violin, & percussion

"Stained Glass" (2009), is a multi-movement work for flute, violin, and percussion written in memory of my Aunt Shirley Elouise Pargeon. She was a magnificent stained glass artist who started her work in the early 70's, opened up her own studio in California, and taught classes in her trade. I knew her only in my childhood, and many of my memories about her exist only in the fantastical, surreal, and bittersweet tales that my father tells. Her art is a colorful, yet opaque window to her mysterious life.

Rope at the Throat

for flute, violin, 'cello, & percussion