MARIA MELCHIORRE
Staff Writer
Dr. Natasha Farny sat center stage in Rosch Recital Hall on Tuesday Oct. 13, drawing her bow across the strings of a cello in slow, haunting movements and then quick, athletic movements. Farney was performing “Sept Papillons,” a 2000 composition of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.
As an extension of Buffalo’s celebration of Finnish culture, “FinnFest,” Farny, ANA Trio and the Fredonia Cello Choir performed three of Saariaho’s pieces in “An Evening of Kaija Saariaho (1952-).”
The evening opened with Farny accompanying the Fredonia Cello Choir, which she oversees in the School of Music. The Choir, which includes Allen Maracle, Juliette Incandela, Alexander Cousins, Steven Wendell, Samantha King, Nicholas Dubin and Gregory Stebbins, performed the 1998 piece “Neiges.” This polyphonic piece of spectralist composition traveled through the recital hall, echoing back on itself in an overlapping glissando, or a gliding from pitch to pitch.
“Playing ‘Neiges’ was a lot of fun,” said King. “The piece is very different from what I’m used to playing and more difficult technically. I loved playing ‘Neiges,’ and all of the hard work was worth it in the end because it sounds wonderful.” The piece, composed for eight cellos, is focused on symmetry and repetition, like the geometry of a snowflake.
Kaija Saariaho sought a different musical language.
“Instead of melody and harmony, she explored sound for sound’s sake,” said Paul Coleman, composer and professor of music theory and composition.
Coleman spoke between compositions on Tuesday evening, discussing Saariaho’s compositional language and unique instrumentality. He explained the partials — or harmonics — of a note and how, in Saariaho’s music, the sound is a journey along the harmonic spectrum from high to low registers. Saariaho’s music addresses “how to deconstruct that original sound, to use it as a compositional element or a color,” said Coleman.
The second piece of the evening, Farny’s solo “Sept Papillons,” was an intense amalgamation of extreme bow pressure, long drawn-out journeys from note to note and vibrant moments of staccato. It brought to mind the “question of noise versus pitch,” according to Coleman.
The final piece on Tuesday was the 2007 composition “Mirage,”performed by ANA Trio: Angela Haas, Anne Kissel and Farny. ANA Trio, a piano-soprano-cello collaboration, works with and performs the works of many living composers. “Mirage” is based on a text by Mazatec shaman and healer Maria Sabina.
“I am the shooting star, woman beneath the water,” sang Haas, a translation of Sabina’s Psilocybe-mushroom-induced chants.
Sabina’s healing rituals were centered around the consumption of this trance-inducing mushroom. Kissel played piano in this piece. The piano playing was unique, as it was done in a way that reduced each note to its different harmonics. This included holding and tapping the strings to produce different sounds than one would usually expect to hear within the spectrum.
This musical technique within which Saariaho works is called spectralism. It focuses on the timbre changes and the places between the notes, or “what happens in the cracks,” as Coleman described it. This technique of music is often referred to as more of an aesthetic than a style. This aligns with how Coleman describes the compositional elements in Saariaho’s pieces as deconstructed into “color.” In spectralism, the spectrums of light and sound are treated very much the same.
Coleman felt that the inclusion of a FinnFest event, which is organized in a different city every year, brought appreciated recognition to the campus. The performance, which was free and open to the public, was a “wonderful opportunity for the School of Music to showcase its talented cellists,” said Coleman.