On 31st May, there’ll be an evening of works for strings by London-based American composer Jon Paul Mayse. As the concert title (‘Faith & Memory: New Works For Strings’) suggests, it’ll be an interesting mixture of religiosity and scientific enquiry: an unusual juxtaposition, and rare in its determination to pay equal concern to both.
Producing music that’s “spacious, colorful, and often quiet, almost to the point of silence”, Jon’s already known for his interest in “memory, gesture, perception, and the expressive potentials of virtuosity” and for his interest in the crossing of disciplines, forms and modes of working. Back home in Philadelphia, he’s been an advocate and champion of various electro-acoustic and multi-media musical formats across concert halls and classical dance space as well as within opera, partly through founding the city’s Live/Wire Opera Company and its related Ensemble; he’s also written a piece for bassoon in which the player triggers and controls the stage lighting, and is looking into developing an ambisonic choral piece. But even when the technology’s not present and he’s working with traditional and purely acoustic orchestral instruments, the preoccupation with sophisticated psychological processes continues, Some of his pieces, such as the recorder trio ‘Assembly’, plays around with compositional deconstruction and reconstruction like a Lego champion; and as his website notes, he’s investigated “style and imitation in ‘Tapas’ (for cello and bassoon), color and sound in ‘Color Studies’ (for cello and percussion quartet), and faith in ‘Seven Last Words’ (for solo cello), ‘Psalm for Cello and Choir’, and his ‘String Trio’…”
Entirely acoustic, this particular London concert seems to be paring down Jon’s concerns to a manageable few, beginning with two of the aforementioned “works of matters of faith”. In the tradition of Bach and James Macmillan (in terms of cultural continuity, if not necessarily musical approach), the cello solo ‘Seven Last Words’ explores the final utterances of Christ at Golgotha. “The first movement reflect upon Christ’s physical suffering, the punishments and beatings laid upon him. The middle movement is a duet between a normal, minor elegy and a calming countermelody entirely in harmonics, depicting Mary at the foot of the cross being consoled by Christ. The final movement reflects upon the spiritual isolation Christ would have felt under the weight of the world’s sins, shown in violent cries and outbursts answered by only silence.”
Jon also explains that the preceding ‘String Trio’ is “a study of biblical Light and Darkness. Darkness is portrayed by scratch tones, extreme dynamics, and fast, nervous figurations, while Light is portrayed by harmonics, longer tones, and a rising melody, which is taken from my setting of the end of the Easter Exultet:(“May this flame, be found still burning, By the morning star, the one morning star…”). At the outset, the Light theme emerges out of scratch tones, which then crescendo into a series of alternations between hammered and harmonic chords. After a number of episodes, the piece ends with a meditation on the baptism of Christ, in which all the instruments play short harmonic notes and the Light theme appears in the viola (the Son), then cello (the Father), the violin (Descending Dove).”.
Here’s a previous performance:
The final piece – a premiere – is Jon’s ‘String Quartet’, which “explores memory, sonically and personally” and draws on both Beethoven and post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard for inspiration. It’s a further extrapolation of Jon’s earlier piece ”Three Errors in Recall’, which he notes “maps memory recall errors to bow technique (I know, sexy).” Here’s what the source piece sounded like…
Jon Paul Mayse: ‘Faith & Memory: New Works For Strings’
Rudolf Steiner House, 35 Park Road, Marylebone, London, NW1 6XT, England
Friday 31st May 2019, 7.00pm – information here and here
Misfit City 
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