echoing, echoing
Am I unfair being instantly skeptical of anything with lowercase titles? As if being “literary” were as easy as abstaining from the shift key.
However, any dubiousness surrounding AMOC’s “the echoing of tenses” was unwarranted. This top-notch concert — at the 92nd St. Y Thursday, May 19 — deserved a much bigger audience showing than it got.
It was the New York premiere of Anthony Cheung’s “song cycle” setting poems by contemporary Asian-American poets: Arthur Sze, Jennie Xie, Cathy Park Hong, Li-Young Lee, Victoria Chang, Ocean Vuong, and Monica Youn.
The phrase “the echoing of tenses” comes from Xie’s The Rupture Tense. All the poets, except for Hong and (most disappointingly for me) Vuong, were there.
Many read aloud, as the poems were projected on a screen. The songs also featured tenor Paul Appleby, violinist Miranda Cuckson (to whom they’re dedicated), and Cheung himself on piano.
Preceding the concert was a roundtable, which I sat through impatiently, but later appreciated much more. The poets discussed themes of silence/the unsayable, form/container, and time/memory.
Cheung’s first song set Sze’s “The Network.” “The air is alive and hums then,” Sze intoned. “And the mind’s speech is so quick it breaks the sound barrier and shatters glass.” The violin’s off-key glissando mingled with lapping water sounds.
Next was Xie’s “Misconjugate.” It began with, “When the distance between subject and verb is larger than the tongue’s measurement.”
Cheung played an electronic keyboard atop the piano, like a makeshift organ. The dissonant notes rubbed up against each other and echoed uncannily, as if detuning themselves.
“My present tenses are just basins where endings approach room temperature,” read Xie, amidst violin tremolos and seagull-like sounds.
Next was Cheung’s setting of Hong’s “The Golden State.” Appleby’s caramelly tenor is the kind that sounds consonant even when the notes are not. When he sang, “What time zone is this,” it was joined by furious pizzicato.
In an interlude based on Jennie Xie’s “Expenditures,” the musicians made a “bed of nails” of sound. On top of this: “Days later, I find sutures of words dampening against the page.”
In the song setting Xie’s “In Search Of,” both Appleby and Cuckson uttered the words, “The sweat of the unsayable.”
I found the song based on Lee’s “The Gift” the least engrossing, maybe because it lacked piano.
As an interlude, Chang read “Dear Grandmother.” Without the projected text, I had to pay more attention.
In Cheung’s setting of Vuong’s “The Gift,” a recorded voice (the poet’s?) chanted “A B C.” “A strand of black hair unraveled,” it continued. “How it fell onto the page and lived with no sound.”
The scratchy sound of writing sounded so close that I worried it was me. With “The pencil snaps,” the violin stopped abruptly. This was followed by the throbbing phrase: “I still hear it.
In the interlude, Sze’s voice was like calligraphy strokes, subtly rising and falling.
The setting of Youn’s “Brownacre” was characterized by undulating polyrhythms. The evocative line, “The music stands of an absent orchestra,” was followed by piano “droplets.”
The interlude, Chang’s “Memory,” was like a lament: “My mother's death can’t be a memory but is an imagination.”
Appleby was just as sweet-voiced in a love song based on Sze’s “Transfigurations.” There was plenty of word painting, with “I know that rustle now” evoked by violin hairs.
“How did it evolve from carnivore to eater of bamboo?,” sung Appleby about a panda. “So many transfigurations I will never fathom.”
The song ends on the word “breath.” Cuckson played a long violin stroke, as Appleby rendered the final “th” impossibly stretched.