Welcome back to her kind; I hope you all had a lovely holiday break (and can manage to hang on for just a couple more weeks before the semester ends)!

This week, I want to dive into another composer I love—one who is still making waves throughout the contemporary scene today: Sky Macklay. Macklay is currently teaching at Peabody, and as a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, she’s working to release a chamber music album that synthesizes her work as a composer as well as her “raucous, multiphonic-rich oboe practice.”

Macklay’s music is filled with unexpected and conventional textures—one can hear this in her piece ‘White/Waves’ and ‘Chopped,’ as well as her iconic string quartet, ‘Many Many Cadences.’

‘Many Many Cadences’ is one of my favorite string quartets, and one of the first string quartets I discovered by a living composer. The piece re-contextualizes traditional harmonies—repeating a series of cadences in quick succession to form phrases and motives.  The colors and textures Macklay extracts from the strings through developing the material provides an effective contrast to the bright, piercing nature of the initial motive. It’s wonderfully playful, which is something I strive for in my own writing, as well. At the end of the piece, when the initial motive returns, it’s transformed through the most delightful onslaught of slides—the motive is almost indistinguishable, but ultimately it’s just present enough for the ear to catch on.

Another stunning piece by Macklay is her violin and piano duo, FastLowHighSlow. Immediately, one can hear her playing with textures and registers—which is implied by the title. The piece particularly direct in concept, but it kept my interest the whole way through listening because of Macklay’s unique use of textural combinations.

Aside from her music, Macklay’s outlook on music also resonates with me:

“I love weird contemporary music and sharing it with the next generation,” she explained. “I think a lot of it is sharing my own personal perspective on it—just show how much a particular sound excites me and how beautiful I think it is.  I think that’s sort of contagious, or at least let’s people perceive it as a beautiful thing, or something that some person thinks is a beautiful thing. I also think that exposure, experience, experiential education, and experiential pieces are really a great way to do outreach. … That’s something I think more composers should do: write music that has a participatory role for amateur musicians, or for just audience members.”

Finding ways to connect over the beauty of something—sounds, colors, experiences—is the primary reason I pursue art. If you want to connect over the beauty of Macklay’s music, you can listen here on the her kind playlist, or check out her scores on YouTube!

“The art of music is capable of touching and approaching mysteries and laws existing in the cosmos and in the world.” —Sofia Gubaidulina

This week, I had the pleasure of researching and listening to the music of Sofia Gubaidulina—a composer whose studies took place in Soviet Russia. Born in 1931, Gubaidulina is considered one of the foremost Russian composers of the second half of the twentieth century.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Piano Concerto Introitus is a one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve listened to recently. The opening unfolds from hollow, plaintive moans in the flutes and rises up in register and orchestration, building momentum to a near unison statement of one of the piece’s primary gestures. I love her choice to use the lowest registers of the flute to open the piece–it creates a beautiful, sacred ambience. Intervals of minor seconds, harmonic and melodic, evoke mysterium and tension.

The piano enters briefly after the fall of the first climactic moment, and Gubaidulina hovers again in the bass register. The strings prolong mysticism and tension with buzzing tremolos and half steps; the woodwinds create a sustained backdrop in contrast to the other textures being used. It’s surprising how little the piano is really used, considering it’s a piano concerto, but I actually love the way Gubaidulina feels no obligation to keep the pianist active for the majority of the first half of the piece. It’s unexpected, and the limited use of the piano draws more attention to it when it is playing.

She makes use of simple ascending and descending scales in layers and layers of canons with the upper voices of woodwinds. The piano’s melody returns, and strings enter in the low register, echoing chords we’d heard earlier in the piano–then echoing the scales we’d just heard in the woodwinds. This time, richer and fuller, the scalar gesture opens up to a brief bassoon/piano duet which evolves into a call-and-response between the piano and the orchestra.

Towards the end of the piece, there’s a section filled with trills layered one on top of the other which evolves in to these almost bell-like chords chiming in the piano part over a bed of trills in the string section. The strings fade away, and the piano is left alone to play meditative, scalar figures once again—this time, with harmonic seconds floating on top.

The concerto ends with a haunting trill at the top of the piano’s range that serves in opposition to the concerto’s opening. It seems as if the piece itself serves as an ascent—perhaps to the celestial, or as a metaphor in line with the “Introitus” title, ascending from the secular to the sacred at the beginning of a religious event. This idea of ascent is also apparent in smaller motives throughout the piece; particularly in the sweeping gesture of the strings that serves as a pillar Gubaidulina keeps returning to. There’s a constant rise and fall that drives forward the concerto until we arrive at the end, suspended above.

The interaction and consideration between all the voices and textures in this concerto is stunning. The textures and gestures are reminiscent of Debussy and Messiaen perhaps, but Gubaidulina’s voice is strong. Her music was thought of as troublesome during her studies in Soviet Russia, but she was supported by Shostakovich, who in evaluating her final examination encouraged her to continue down her path despite others calling it “mistaken.” I’m grateful he encouraged her, because this piece is quite lovely. If you’d like to take a listen, you can follow this link to the her kind playlist.