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| Julia Adolphe |
I
first came in contact with
Julia Adolphe's music on a road trip to
play at the Pikes Falls Music Festival in Vermont. My drivers were Evan
Soloman
and Sarah D'Angelo, a
wonderful couple, artistic team, and entrepreneurial force. They are
the co-founders of INSCAPE chamber
ensemble, a Grammy-nominated group that performs all over America. They
also established a summer residency at Pikes Falls, where I've been
lucky enough to play
with them these past two years. We were all listening to a first edit
of their new CD "American Aggregate", which would soon be released.
Evan
and Sarah, who had just come out of the recording studio, were
obsessively picking out little details and assessing the cuts with a
critical ear. Meanwhile, I was relaxing in the backseat, simply curious
about
all the new compositional voices I was hearing. Julia's piece came on,
and I
was immediately entranced. The piece "Wordless Creatures" created a
sensation that I now associate with Julia's music of constant growth.
It is a
kind of story-telling--full of churning motion and development. There
are
identifiable themes and gestures, but the music never feels steady;
rather, it is in constant evolution. Whether slow or fast, her
inventiveness is in direct dialogue with my curiosity.
I
recently visited a friend who nervously read aloud a mystery she had written
full of twists and turns. We discussed at length how, when sculpting a plot, the author must remain sensitive to what the
reader does or does not know. Pacing the revelation of information so that the story is
constantly stimulating, intriguing yet natural requires incredible
virtuosity. I returned from this visit to rehearse and realized that Julia's music possesses this gift and only grows more
interesting as we delve deeper into our interpretive process.
I had the fortune to perform "Veil of
Leaves" that same summer in Pikes Falls. Sometimes I
hunger for music to begin from absolute stillness, from some sort of
primal origin, which "Veil of Leaves" does. In this work, the opening
four-voice unison is our point of departure, from which the sounds seem to
split off from each other, like shards of refracted light
radiating away from a center. The initial whole dissolves into a miniature in the
form of little rhythmic motives that each instrument plays with a special
technique called artificial harmonics. We lightly place our fingers on
the strings, creating a much higher sound with a windy, whistling quality
to it. Complexity and an almost raucous chaos ensues when these atoms
of the theme are set free to clash and crash against each other in the
middle section before culminating in a powerful climax.
In
her work
"Between the Accidental", the music begins with far more energy and
agitation, through the use of a myriad of dissonant sonorities. Still, I
feel
this constant sense of diffusion and growth, in which the musical
narrative constantly defies expectation, turning and expanding from the
unified "once upon a time" of 16th notes that opens
the work.
Julia's music challenges all our expressive and
technical faculties, but it is so rewarding. Like a great novel in which you already
know the ending but forget how the hero might get there, her lines transport us into their story. We can't wait to share these
new pieces with you at upcoming concerts including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in NYC on March 14.
-Esme Allen-Creighton
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