At Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, Tania León and Steven Mackey Model Generous Collaboration

Tanglewood, one of the world’s most famous music festivals, convenes in western Massachusetts every summer. Nestled in the Berkshire Hills on the Tanglewood estate, the resident Boston Symphony Orchestra and a host of classical music luminaries present concerts of every genre, including choral music, jazz, pop, and symphonic music. But Tanglewood isn’t only for star sightings and outdoor picnics: the estate also houses the Tanglewood Music Center. Founded in 1940, the TMC exists as a premier academy for the rising generation of musicians to hone skills and gain performance experience under the mentorship of an acclaimed faculty.

Directed by Ed Gazouleas, the TMC also presents the annual Festival of Contemporary Music. Marking its 60th anniversary this season, the Festival invited composers Tania León and Steven Mackey to serve as co-directors. León and Mackey generously decided to present their work in conversation with a wide range of composers in various career stages. I was there for the week, and two concerts on July 25 and 27 exemplified the collaborative spirit and lively discussion provoked by this choice.

The first program on Thursday, July 25 opened with two solo piano works. Leila Adu-Gilmore’s United Underdog deployed dramatic silences and choreographed sequences of forearm chords, performed with dramatic and physical mastery by pianist Zhaoyuan Qin. Miya Masaoka’s moving Praying for a Sign, which reflects on the experience of her Japanese relatives who were interned in concentration camps, harnessed the piano’s tremendous resonance through long tremolos and continuous pedal. Fragments of “America the Beautiful” woven through thick blocks of sound transformed the piano into a shaking symbol of contained passion.

Nathalie Joachim’s The Race: 1915 pit electronics against Luis Parra’s fragmented, blues-inspired cello melodies and simultaneous recitations of powerful excerpts from the Black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. The year 1915 marked the beginning of the Great Migration, which saw millions of African Americans in the Jim Crow south migrate to northern and western states. During this time, a young Josephine Baker, the dedicatee of Valerie Coleman’s Suite: Portraits of Josephine, was surviving racial violence in St. Louis, MO and beginning her journey to superstardom as a singer and dancer; Coleman’s cheeky four-movement wind quintet traced her musical environments from Missouri big band to dazzling Parisian cabarets.

Trevor Weston’s A.N.S. (A New Sound) for marimba and flute responds to Duke Ellington’s belief that Americans need “a new sound of harmony, brotherly love, common respect, and consideration for the dignity and freedom of men.” Using elements of African American music from various American idioms, Weston refuses to compartmentalize Black music. Flutist Elizabeth McCormack and percussionist Soojin Kang offered spectacular performances: continuous flutter tonguing coaxed unusually disjointed sounds from the flute, while the marimba revealed dynamic range and harmonic resonances in Weston’s suggestion of a new sound.

The midday performance on Saturday, July 27 opened with Dai Wei’s Partial Men, a shining example of electronic effects that amplified her singing, complicated string quartet harmonies through looping, and enhanced the story of a dramatic medical journey. With a drastically contrasting soundscape, Salina Fisher’s piano trio, Kintsugi, gestured to the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery through fragile piano writing, delicate string harmonics, and gossamer trio textures.

Nick DiBerardino’s string quartet, Beet Juice, hid extreme technical demands behind the rock concert energy appropriately inspired by the effects of beet juice on athletic performance. Angélica Negrón’s dóabin considered imagination and childlike play, setting a language invented by isolated identical twins for brass quartet and electronics. Ileana Perez Velazquez’ Vuelo for string quintet and soprano highlighted the rhythmic beauty of Spanish text setting. Dictated by the structure of Spanish poet Miguel Hernández’ titular poem and conducted with ease by Molly Turner, the through-composed art song revealed the strident internal conflicts that bubble beneath seemingly simple atmospheres.

Works by Tania León and Steven Mackey were the Festival throughline, with each program featuring one or more pieces by both directors. At the July 25 concert, León’s Indigena for chamber orchestra and piano — which mixes pointillistic precision with complex Cuban rhythms and fragmented orchestral melodies with Afro-Cuban sounds — reflected her experiences of exile and cultural displacement between Cuba and the U.S. Atwood Songs, performed brilliantly by soprano Temple Hammen and pianist Craig Daffron Jordan on July 27, presents bleak Margaret Atwood poetry in five self-contained scenes that blend stunning operatic singing with bursts of the blues and Cuban dance music. León’s musical method of considering heritage and identity is akin to an enormous ancient tapestry: too rich and intricate to absorb at a glance, one must surrender to the present moment and accept each detail as it pops into attention.

For Mackey, his varied pursuits inform his music: his background in physics, professional freestyle skiing, and serious electric guitar performance collide in works that sparkle with both precision and exuberance. Afterlife is the third part of Mackey’s Time Cycle for voice and percussion ensemble; featuring a mezzo-soprano soloist and four percussionists playing 25 instruments, the work was featured on the July 25 program. Against a musical texture obsessed with measurement and punctuation, the vocal part flips between pop and bel canto singing as the libretto reflects on the powers of love and loss. And on July 27, we heard Measuring, a work for a nine-piece ensemble that translates the “Viscosity, Velocity, Porosity, and Ductility” qualities of material substances into starting points for the various textures a chamber orchestra can achieve.

León and Mackey’s decision to showcase colleagues only enhanced their own contributions to the program: their distinct compositional voices came into sharper focus through such varied contrast. Ed Gazouleas’ support at the TMC created a flexible and porous container for their breadth of vision, and the generous programming gave performers and audiences an example of collaboration where more was absolutely more.

 

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