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Creative Collaboration: The Making of Steve Mackey’s It Is Time
Part III
Time sits
Time stands Time is time… from Isaac Maliya’s, Time is Time |
Several
years ago So Percussion had the honor of commissioning Steven Mackey for a new
percussion quartet. Steve –
Professor of Composition and Chair of the Music Department at Princeton
University – is one of the most omnivorous and brilliant composers in America
today.
During
the course of a year and a half, we worked closely with Steve to craft a new
piece that highlights each of us as performers and interpreters. We found the end result to be
astonishing in its innovation and conceptual power.
Over
this series of four articles, we’ll dissect each movement through the eyes of
the individual members of the group: Eric, Josh, Adam, and Jason. We’ll also talk about working with
Steve to unlock the potential in each of these instruments.
This
article focuses on Adam Sliwinski and the marimba in the third movement. It appears in the third issue of Avue Magazine, a publication of Adams Instruments. The movement runs from 16:30 to 27:00 in the video below.
Il Penseroso
“Adam, I hate to tell you this, but you’ve got
the slow movement. I was hoping to
show you all off, but I need to do something else.”
When the time arrived for Steve Mackey to write
the third movement of It Is Time, we
had already decided that he’d write marimba music for me. In the previous two installments of
this series of articles, Josh and Eric related how simultaneously generous and
demanding Steve is as a composer. He invites you in to the process, asks
for input, even what instrument(s) you’d like to play…then writes fiendishly
difficult music so well that you have no choice but to commit to it.
In
So Percussion, everything is equal.
We make artistic decisions by consensus, everybody has the same vote,
and we do our best not to present the group as having hierarchy. A lot of our repertoire features this
same dynamic, even to the point where each of us plays identical instruments in
layers of complexity (Reich, Lang, Xenakis).
It Is Time is designed to break the
pattern of anonymity within our music, while still setting us all on equal
footing. I think initially in
Steve’s mind, it meant that each of us would also get to rock out on our
instrument, displaying the kind of virtuosity that makes percussion music so
exciting and fun.
By
the time Eric’s and Josh’s movement were sketched out, Steve realized that the
piece was taking on epic proportions, and its story was turning darker. The first time he told me where the
marimba movement was going, it was by way of apology. His meditation on the concept of time had lead him to a more
melancholic place, where exhilaration at the thought of controlling and
harnessing time also revealed its indifference and inevitability.
I
was thrilled that Steve would throw this kind of challenge at himself in a
percussion piece. To be honest, my
favorite moments in So’s work happen when a composer finds these spaces for introspection:
sometimes elegiac, often
conflicted. Each one seems to take
the creator by surprise. I’m
thinking especially of the flower pots and teacups in David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, the final
Chorale Prelude in Paul Lansky’s Threads,
and the second movement of Steve Reich’s Mallet
Quartet. Some of Jason’s music
from amid the noise is unbearably melancholic to me, precisely because it isn’t meant to be.
Perhaps
pensive music breaks the mold of expectation of how percussion usually
functions: it seems better suited to a song
with acoustic guitar, or an adagio from a great string quartet. I have always craved this pensive,
reflective mood, believing since I was in high school that percussion could
achieve it. In the best cases, it
inspires what Wordsworth called “thoughts
that do often lie too deep for tears.”
It is not the same thing as being really sad, which can be
tiresome and self-centered.
The third movement of Is It Time begins with the simplest gesture: a bouncing ball, releasing its
potential energy with a burst of optimism, but always returning to rest. Steve wanted “time” - such as it is here
- to come to a screeching halt at the beginning of this section. What had built up into a huge menagerie
of instruments and colors is now reduced to the solo marimba: a quiet roll on one note that barely
erupts into the first bouncing ball.
For awhile, this single gesture repeats:
winding down, restarting, over and over again. While Steve and I were working together, this was
straightforward enough, as learning to control the natural bounce of a stick is
one of the first things that a percussionist has to do. But he wanted to take it further. How could we create polyphony, the
perception of overlapping wind up and release? He wondered if notating gestures with general overlap
indications would be effective.
Not trusting my own ability to be convincing with that, I told him how
much I admire the way composers like Xenakis use precise notation to achieve
chaotic results. In the end, he decided
upon a way of notating the gesture as an accelerating rhythm, so that an
overlapping gesture could be placed anywhere, worked out for performance as a
complex polyrhythm. Paradoxically,
this kind of detailed execution frees the performer from his own tendencies and
limitations. Often as an artist
you want to celebrate those personal tendencies, but in this case we needed an
impersonal, inevitable force.
My movement is somewhat unique in that Steve
already had reams of experience writing for marimba. In the other movements, he actually invented new instruments
(or extended them in entirely new ways).
Our challenge was to get the sound, mood, and pacing just right for this
movement, to expand the reach of the piece into another world, where time is
elastic and ill-defined.
His final touch took me completely by surprise,
and was even annoying: While I
am toiling away at my fateful gestures, the other members of the group rise up
from their instruments and start walking around, placing little dinosaur wind
up toys all over the stage. It’s
chaotic, distracting, and frankly takes a bit of attention away from the
soloist. To my mock-dismay, it was
also pitch-perfect, exactly what the movement needed. After all, the music that
I’m playing is not in any sense about me.
Gravity and nature are indifferent to our need for attention, which is
why we hold them in awe.
This is ultimately the most profound rumination
a pensive moment yields: we are so
small compared with the forces that operate upon our lives. Optimism and action are a struggle
against, or even a celebration of, the fact that our momentum will always
eventually come back to rest.
