Search - Augusta Read Thomas, Pierre Boulez, Chicago MusicNOW Ensemble :: In My Sky at Twilight

Certain strains of music and poetry want to remake the physical world. They propose to temper the air to their liking, and toy freely with weather and terrain. The composer or poet inverts the formulas of Euclid; she sabotages gravity. She ceases to be a law-abiding citizen of her landscape. Instead, she strikes a coup against it: her gestures alone soften the ground or stretch trees. Sunlight curves by her voice. Her emotions quake the earth and make it weep. In 1856, the English critic John Ruskin coined an ungainly phrase for this tendency to transfuse human feeling into natural world. He called it the "pathetic fallacy", an error on part of pathos and "unhinged reason". But it is an enduring mode of expression, and composer Augusta Read Thomas is a master of it. In her 2002 work In My Sky at Twilight, a human voice is the synaptic switchboard, and 18 instrumental performers form the "whole landscape" which "flushes on a sudden" at its sounding. Sung here by soprano Christine Brandes, a dedicatee of the score, the vocal part rules the ensemble with lungs and mouth. Voice sways harmony and color through its declamation; everything expands and contracts, freezes or liquefies, in accord with its line. From a musical perspective, the ensemble itself becomes a world of resonances. The precise thingliness of all these instruments?the bow-hairs and mallets, the blown and struck metal, the pianos pressed and then plucked with flesh and nail?all these acoustic machines become echo-vehicles. In every material but voice, they mirror and inspire the life of the voice. And so the singer herself becomes Echo?s opposite?not a woman confined to parroting back the sounds of unknowing nature, but a woman able to press those sounds into being herself. The inanimate is animated and begins to move; it prefaces and trails the singer, amplifies and tapers her flight. This is perhaps the dominant plot of Thomas?s work as a whole. But In My Sky at Twilight is a kind of summa for the composer. No doubt only a temporary one, but one which newly perfects her persistent vision: to dissolve with a single voice the absolute power of nature, and sympathize nature into singing along. For Thomas this plot is more than a literary conceit, also more than a "style". It exists first in the music, sparked by the composer?s analytic ear. Chords of opposing densities collect in close succession and generate a harmonic current. Gestures surface and crystallize in grades. And from their choreography emerges a kind of unfettered form?form as the shape of change, as the voice?s path through the landscape it has revised.