By Bill Doolittle • Photos By Matt Johnson
Composers are always warning reviewers, and listeners, not to get carried away thinking the music is ABOUT something. Paints a picture. Tells a story.
But listening to the premiere of Daniel Gilliam’s Suite for Ten Instruments this listener couldn’t help feeling a sense of nature unfolding. Of a seed popping open and tiny roots taking hold. As the music was debuted by the NouLou Chamber Players in a concert at the Library at Oxmoor Farm, the notes unfolded gently, so softly, with an instrument speaking here, and another there, like tiny rivulets of water getting together after a rain …
But later, the composer doesn’t seem to be buying our nature notion.
“I think in this day and age we’re so connected to the city, we’re so connected to cars and the conveniences – and I’m not trying to sound like Wendall Berry or Harlan Hubbard – but I think we all crave that,” says Gilliam. “We buy plants for the house, take walks in the park, and I think that somehow makes its way into my music sometimes.”
But it is secondary.
“For this piece, the music came first,” says Gillam. “I don’t typically write music from a non-musical perspective first. In other words, I don’t come up with, ‘I want to write music about the ocean,’ and then proceed to write ocean music. I tend to write the music first.”
Which is how the Suite for Ten Instruments was born. Gilliam specifically set out to write a composition for ten instruments. Which is an unusually large number of players in chamber music.
The idea came from a discussion Gilliam had with cellist Cecilia Huerta-Lauf, who is kind of the ringleader of a band of professional musicians that call themselves the NouLou Chamber Players. Cecilia asked Daniel to create a new composition that the core musicians of the NouLou could premiere. (And looking ahead to the happy ending of the story, the debut was a success, and the NouLou plans another performance of Suite for Ten Instruments this season. Which will be professionally recorded – a new record!)
“Cecilia wanted a piece that involved as many of their core players as possible,” explains Gilliam. “The NouLou’s concerts have varied, depending on the repertoire. It might be a string quartet featured for a concert, or a harp and flute duet. For this, she wanted as many of their regular performers as possible. Sort of, everybody gets to play on this one.”
The original idea was for Gilliam to create a piece with the same instrumentation as the famous Beethoven Septet, which the NouLou had performed a few years ago. A septet is seven players: often four strings and three winds. Beethoven’s Septet was pretty much the composer’s first big hit, and NouLou concert-goers loved it.
The group followed with Schubert’s Octet, that everyone loved, too. But septets, octets, nonettes are very rare in the chamber music repertoire. There aren’t many of them.
Meanwhile, Gilliam’s commission grew from seven to eight players, then nine, and finally to a 10-player decet. Which is so rare, nobody was even sure how to pronounce “decet.” Is it like deck-ette? Or maybe dess-ette?
Gilliam thought “ten instruments” was a better choice, with six movements collected as a suite.
In rehearsals the group got the seating worked out, and it kind of reinforces the concept: On the left, the four string players: Heather Thomas (violin), Laura De St. Croix (viola), Cecilia Huerta-Lauf (cello), Brian Thacker (double bass). On the right, four wind players: Kathleen Karr (flute), Jennifer Potochnic (oboe), Marilyn Nije (clarinet), Matthew Karr (bassoon). In the middle, and back a little to connect the two sides, Scott Leger (French horn) and Christopher Brody (piano).
Duets inside of Decets
The set-up arranges the players so they can see and hear each other and team together in smaller combinations – taking cues from each other as they play. Duets and trios and the like pop up in different spots, with the mixes of instruments creating unique sounds and colors.
“What I like about the piece is its written for each player to have their own role,” says Marilyn Nije, the clarinetist. In one passage her clarinet is paired with the viola of Laura De St. Croix. One is higher than the other in pitch, but they’re adjacent, with the clarinet able to reach down to the viola, and the viola able to climb to the clarinet. It creates a harmonious – and complementary – coupling. But when do you ever those two together?
French horn player Scott Leger says the group of ten players is a very adaptable mix. “You get that huge force of almost like an orchestra, but everybody is still playing very intimately.
“When only two or three or four instruments play, it’s really cool,” Leger says. “In the middle of a work you get to highlight just a particular combination, or pairing, which is always a really neat thing to do.”
The clarinet-viola duet comes in a movement called “Untitled, with Mozart.” An earlier movement called “A tree (circa 1842)”, partners oboe, bassoon, horn and double bass – a woody bunch.
All ten play on a movement called “Jacob Wrestles with the Angel,” which references an Old Testament tale. A real thinker.
“The idea came to me when I was grappling within the music, wrestling … grappling,” explains Gilliam. “It wasn’t a story that I was reading or pondering, but the title came to mind. I was writing the music and I wanted something that contrasted with the stillness of the first and last movements, something that was a bit more raucous.”
All you’ll ever need to know about glissandos
One striking feature of Jacob’s raucous wrestling is a number of glissandos laced into the music. A glissando is kind of like how the word sounds -- sliding up or down the scale. Like a smooth blur through pitches. That’s easy for string players to do, and the audience can see them do it. For example, watching bassist Brian Thacker start a note with his finger high on a string on the fingerboard. As he slides his finger down the pitch rises. Coming back up it lengthens the vibrating length of the string, and the pitch sliiides lower.
But there’s a variation in this piece.
“You’re not pressing the string down all the way to the fingerboard, it’s kind a your finger just touching the top the string,” says Thacker. That produces “harmonics,” which give off secondary notes that are fainter and higher pitched. Kind of eerie flute-like sounds on top of the bass notes. All sliding down the scale and back up.
Tricky stuff. Hard to explain. But the musicians appreciate the complexity.
Less tricky is the dramatic effect created when the four strings drop out, one by one. “First the violin drops out,” explains the bass player. “Then the viola drops out a few measures later, and it is just cello and bass. Then the cello would drop out – and it is just me. And I finished the last two glissandos.
Great to be the last string standing.
But it’s not just strings. Gillam’s score also calls for glissandos from the wind players.
And who has ever heard of that? A bassoon playing a glissando? Or a horn or oboe?
No matter how fast a player might toggle the keys and depress valves, it seems like a listener would always hear individual notes sound, rather than the steady slurs likes the strings can do.
Heh, heh.
“Of course that creates a bit of a technical problem for the player to solve,” says Gilliam, with an impish smile. “But they’re all pros and know exactly how to approach it. (In rehearsals) we would talk about how do you want to glissen? And we would talk through the effect I wanted and they could figure out to make that effect happen.”
Of course one wouldn’t want too much of that. With your nice chamber music ensemble sounding like a drunken honky-tonk band glissandoing through the last number at 4 am.
But the NouLou pulls the glissandos off with great effect – and the composer is rewarded. “A new tool in the toolbox,” laughs Gilliam.
Technicalities aside, Cecilia Huerta-Lauf finds the effect beautiful. Creating glissandos on her cello and combining hers with others.
“It put an image in my mind of seeing gentle shooting stars,” says Huerta-Lauf. “Just gentle stars because Daniel’s piece has so much to do with nature.”
Nature?
“You can really hear so much of nature in the piece,” she says. “Like the stillness and the spaciousness, and there’s a certain amount of being at peace, as well. Things just line up where they’re supposed to when you’re watching the clouds pass by.”
“Ways to do this without being the starving artist.”
Gilliam creates all this out in the country. He lives in small house on a large rolling farm outside the city. With an old tree that is referenced in the Suite, and a lake, and stars in the sky above.
But he’s not a farmer. The composer’s main job is program director of Louisville Public Media’s WUOL Classical 90.5 FM radio station. The LPM studios are on Fourth Street in downtown Louisville, where you can’t see too many stars, and trees are practically non-existent. But there’s an airiness in the station’s on-air sound. Gilliam hosts his own show weekdays noon to 3 pm. He’s got a professional radio voice, with a pleasant lilt and conversational manner.
That’s Gilliam’s day job, and he’s keeping it. But composing is a love, and he’s had success. A recent collection is titled The Call to Earth, on CD or online. He’s written for pianist Lara Downes, violinist Rob Simonds, and others.
The composing work is mostly done at home. In a simple setting. There’s a traveling notebook at hand, with penciled in notes, sharps and flats. On the stand on the piano are large blank-scored pages, ready for Gilliam’s music to transfer from the notebook and from little ideas he tries out on the keyboard. The piano is an Everett grand. Sturdy, and kind of handsome, in its own way.
“When I moved out here I bought the cheapest piano they had at Henderson Music,” says Gilliam. “It was a 1910 Everett, and it cost $700. But it works. Does what I need it to do. It doesn’t stay in tune very well. But I don’t really care. I know what the notes sound like.”
He also seems to have his composing gig worked out in harmony with his radio career. “It’s always been a balance,” he admits. “But I’m thankful I have a great organization that supports it and understands it.
And not unusual in music.
“There’s a very long and important tradition of composers and artists who have day jobs,” says Gilliam. “The most famous one I think in classical music is Charles Ives with his insurance company. But there’s also the story of Philip Glass driving a taxicab in New York City. A fare got in the cab and said, ‘You know, you have the same name as the composer.’ Going back, Alexander Borodin was a chemist. He taught chemistry full time and composed on the side. So, I think there are lots of creative ways to do this without being the starving artist.”
And the music finds its own world.
“I think it affords me the freedom to write whatever I want whenever I want.”
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