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Mountain - Water - Clear - Remote. Four single words, yet together they have the power to suggest a vast landscape. Composer Bun-Ching Lam loves to explore just such complexity hidden within simplicity. She meticulously develops basic musical materials‹such as tone, texture, and movement-into intricate, elegant works of beauty.
Bun-Ching Lam didn't always envision herself a 'painter' of aural landscapes, however. Born in 1954 in the Portuguese colony of Macau, she trained first as a pianist and received her bachelor's degree in performance from the Chinese University in Hong Kong. She only began composing in 1976, when she moved to the United States as a scholarship student at the University of California at San Diego, where her teachers included Bernard Rands, Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, and Pauline Oliveros, and where she received a Ph.D. in composition in 1981. From 1981 to 1986 Lam taught at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Since then, she has won a Rome Prize and received numerous grants; her works have been featured around the world at prestigious venues (Carnegie Hall: Sudden Thunder, American Composers Orchestra) and festivals (Bang On A Can, Pacific Soundings, Aspekte). Lam now lives in New York, where she enthusiastically collaborates with Chinese musicians, notably pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and works in Chinese Shadow Theater (The Child God). Upcoming premieres include a solo cello piece for Maya Beiser and Fa for the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet.
The five works on this CD span a lengthy, eleven-year period-almost Lam's entire career as a composer-yet they demonstrate a remarkably consistent sound world. Her highly personal musical language integrates the chromatic harmonic vocabulary favored by postwar Western composers with an Asian sensitivity to timbre and the treatment of time. "I'm interested in the purity of resonance," she elaborates. "Music is like an 'action' painting, where ink splashes against the canvas, and drips into thinner lines or settles in blobs, depending on the strength of the brushstroke or the density of the paper. Composers 'throw' notes too-and they 'splash' or resonate in varying ways." (However, when she inflects sustained tones Lam eschews typically "Chinese" techniques-such as microtonal inflection, pitchbending, and varying the intensity of vibrato-in favor of simply altering the resonating pitch1s texture.) "Time must flow in a continuum," she continues, "I'm very concerned with the changing balance between stillness and motion in my music, so working with rhythm is a kind of discipline for me. I like to structure time in periodic, but not square, blocks."
Featured on this CD are three works from Lam's "Spring" cycle, an ongoing series that highlights the piano in various ensemble settings; each piece contrasts specific sonic characteristics of the piano to those of the accompanying group. Lam also plays with and incorporates symbolically the many different meanings of the word "spring" in this cycle; in Chinese poetry, "spring" carries strong associations (the season, a spring of water, spring up/spring down) and is used for veiled references (including sex). Lam hopes to add one more piece to this cycle, a piano concerto entitled Eternal Spring; not recorded here is Springwaters for piano and winds (1980).
After Spring for two pianos (1982-83), lyrical and dream-like, is based upon a simple five-note theme.This melodic cell, heard at the beginning of the piece, is slowly developed and varied, gradually generating chords and flourishes of Romantic sweep. The interval of a perfect fifth (the last two notes of the five-note theme) is significant here both melodically and harmonically; near the work's conclusion, harmonies consist solely of superimposed fifths. Structured formally upon the general scheme of a traditional Chinese Qin composition ("Loose beginning-Into the tune-Contrasting: Into slow-Start again-Ending sound"), this sectional piece also investigates differing, and sometimes contrasting, moods, textures, and densities. Playful rhythmic cycles appear; repeating melodic patterns simultaneously run at different speeds or move in and out of phase as their accented notes shift in relation to the metric beat, and ostinati pulse at slightly irregular intervals of time.
The concept of lyricism governs the trio Another Spring (1988). Here Lam emphasizes the piano's linear capabilities to reflect the alto flute's and cello's inherently melodic natures. She also blends the instruments' timbres into a harmonious whole while retaining the individual quality of each instrument's voice. Numerous types of articulation in this trio colorfully generate an array of resonances.
The dark, brooding Last Spring (1992), written for pianist Ursula Oppens and the Arditti String Quartet, exemplifies Lam's mature compositional style. Here she probes the piano and string quartet1s varying technical abilities to reverberate. "Unlike the string quartet," she elaborates, "the piano is incapable of modifying a sound once the key is depressed, nor is it possible to sustain a sound for very long. Yet it can produce massive sonority, overpowering most instruments. In Last Spring the string quartet is often used as an amplification of and an extension to the piano1s resonance: at times echoing, other times reacting." This concept is introduced in the piece's opening: the piano's violent, yet quickly fading chords are prolonged by soft, scurrying figures in the strings. These both extend the duration of the piano's motive and modify its resonating texture. The idea of "separation"-the phasing in and out of togetherness-is likewise crucial in this piece. Lam plays with the relationship between the piano and the strongly individual timbres of the strings, by occasionally blending, but most often keeping them distinct. Similarly, at times she tricks the listener by making ambiguous the exact placement of the beat; only rarely does the full ensemble observe the same accented beats.
Completing this CD are two of Lam's virtuosic works for solo instruments, idiomatically conceived and sensitively written for the performer. Bittersweet Music I (1981) explores the piccolo's expressive capacity and timbral possibilities, and consciously employs pitchbending and microtones to emulate the sound of a dizi (Chinese bamboo flute). The "beats" resulting from octave multiphonics phasing in and out of perfect tune provide further textural coloring. Lü for percussion (1983), a stunning dance score for Seattle choreographer Gina Gibney, evokes a woman making an imaginary journey of the spirit. (Lü means journey or travelling in Chinese.) Applying Gibney's conception, Lam divided the score into six connected sections entitled "Preparation-Emerge-Travel-Offer-Collect-Sacrifice"; each movement, she explains, signifies a different stage in the woman1s journey, "somewhat analogous to the Buddha's search for enlightenment." Rhythmic cycles and structural symmetry help unify this work, whose movements present an ever-changing number of instruments progressing through the timbres offered by the different percussion families (wood-skin-metal). The repeated striking of a woodblock demarcates a continually varying cycle in "Preparation," Lü1s opening movement. This gentle sound, followed by louder gestures in the other instruments, mirrors the opening of Last Spring: thunderous piano chords followed by soft string murmurings. An unexpectedly ethereal "sacrifice" concludes Lü; eerie timbral howls accompany the protagonist as she simply passes into another dimension.
- © 1996 Mary Lou Humphrey
Formed in Seattle in 1979, the NEW PERFORMANCE GROUP is comprised of a core of seven musicians, often augmented by guest artists. The group performs music from a wide range of twentieth century styles, but typically focuses on the work of living American composers. One of the group's most satisfying activities has been the presentation of works in collaboration with the composers themselves, including Charles Amirkhanian, Henry Brant, John Cage, Anthony Davis, Robert Dick, Paul Dresher, Janice Giteck, Malcolm Goldstein, Lou Harrison, Bun-Ching Lam, Tania León, James Tenney and Chinary Ung.
Many recordings have emerged as products of these collaborations: Night Songs by Paul Dresher, on New Albion Records; John Cage conducting his full-length Atlas Eclipticalis with Winter Music, on Mode Records; Bun-Ching Lam conducting her Four Beckett Songs, included in a special collector's edition of the poetry of Samuel Beckett; and two CDs of Janice Giteck's works: Breathing Songs on Mode, and Home on New Albion. A five-part radio series entitled Sinister Resonance, consisting of recordings of past performances along with interviews of ensemble members, was developed and nationally distributed by Seattle's Jack Straw Foundation.
In addition to its concerts with the Cornish Music Series, since 1994 the New Performance Group has been a participating ensemble in Music in Motion, a national new music network created to build new audiences for new music. As one of the five ensembles selected for this project, the New Performance Group has traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Painted Bride in Philadelphia, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts and Orlando Art Museum in Florida, working with composers Deidre Murray, Stuart Dempster, Rinde Eckert, Chinary Ung and William Duckworth.
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