Five of the 11 composers who work and teach locally were in the audience: Jan Swafford, Marti Epstein, Yu-Hui Chang, Howard Frazin, and Dalit Hadass Warshaw. David Rakowski, Laura Kaminsky, John Kennedy, Andy Vores, Jeffrey Mumford, and the musical theater duo Emma Lively and Tyler Beattie supplied the remaining six pieces.
At least two of the composers (Epstein and Warshaw) admitted they had never visited the Grand Canyon. Perhaps that explains the generic intellectual approach of Epstein’s “So Near, So Far (in six movements),’’ whose intimacy diminishes nearly to incoherent inaudibility. In “Naissance,’’ a reflection upon a Native American myth, Warshaw imposes a chilly mathematical control, devising a series of numbers and set classes that make more sense on paper than in performance.
Some of the other composers knew the canyon well. Speaking briefly before the performance of “The Silence at Yuma Point,’’ Swafford confessed to being an “old canyon hiker’’ fond of its buttes and rocks. He responded to the inward experience of the “windless silence,’’ using a unifying ghostly descending four-note motif.
Several works employed river and water imagery. Chang’s haunting “Rio del Tizon’’ gurgled and bubbled with plaintive echoes of Native American song. Rakowski’s rhapsodic “Luccicare’’ glistened, shimmered, and conjured up the eternal spirit of J.S. Bach, another spectacular natural monument.
All the composers presented Rider with formidable technical and artistic demands (strange harmonics, bowing over the bridge, bent pitches) that she met with exemplary control and artistic exuberance. But little of music captured the pungent aroma of the dusty Southwestern surroundings. Call me old-fashioned, but I kept waiting for some of the grand frontier muscle of “On the Trail’’ from Ferde Grofé’s panoramic “Grand Canyon Suite.’’
Harlow Robinson can be reached at harlo@mindspring.com.
