If you suffered from workplace or classroom stress on Thursday, Mandeville Auditorium on the UCSD campus was the place to be. There, anxious or weary souls could bask in the gently reflective music of Leilehua Lanzilotti, inti figgis-vizueta and Mariel Roberts, persuasively performed by the Argus Quartet.
Violinists Clara Kim, Giancarlo Latta, violist Maren Rothfritz, and cellist Mariel Roberts played works that required more collaboration with the composers than traditional classical music demands. Old school string quartets play the rhythms and pitches strictly notated on the page, never deviating from composers’ indications of tempo, dynamics.
In every composition on Thursday’s program, rhythms were often free and players could improvise pitches. The Argus Quartet played a crucial role in shaping the scores.
Leilehua Lanzilotti was present to perform her solo viola work, “ko’u inoa,” and to introduce her pieces. This wasn’t Lanzilotti’s first appearance in the area. Four years ago she appeared at the Carlsbad Music Festival as a violist and composer.
“Ko’u inoa” exclusively employs the string technique “bariolage.” In bariolage, open strings are alternated with fingered strings to create a flickering sound. Lanzilotti also slowly moved her bow from high up on the viola’s fingerboard to down near its bridge. It was a music that shimmered, whose surface constantly changed while pitches were more gradually changed.
Beneath it all was a traditional Hawaiian melody that was stretched out, a personal homesickness balm for Lanzilotti, a Kanaka Maoli, or native Hawaiian.
There was a more widely familiar quotation in Lanzilotti’s “the space in which to see.” The theme from the “Finale” of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” was played by the first violin over chirping sounds in the viola and whining harmonics in the second violin.
Like the bariolage in “ko’u inoa,” much of “the space in which to see” consisted of harmonically static but actively moving textures. The Argus Quartet played with authority.
Lanzilotti pointed out that the program contrasted Indigenous people’s approaches to form and knowledge involving land and water.
The other Indigenous composer on the concert was inti figgis-vizueta, who is of Andean heritage. The scores to “mayu: the great river” and “Talamh (land)” appear sparse on the page, providing harmonies, graphic notations, and verbal instructions to get from one structural point to the next. Oral transmission of knowledge during rehearsals is an important component of these works.
What figgis-vizueta and the Argus Quartet gave us was the pleasure of living inside textures, the simple yet profound appreciation of leisurely exploring a sonority, allowing our ears time to engage with it. Figgis-vizueta’s pieces were magical soundscapes.
Mariel Roberts’ “Circumvolution” bore superficial similarities to textures heard elsewhere on the program. The first section consists of long held notes, sometimes coordinated into unison attacks, sometimes bleeding across one harmony into the next. In the final section, tremolos and trills in all four instruments unpredictably shifted into new harmonies.
Lanzilotti’s ahupua’a explored a unique sound in each of its movements: wind-like tones in the first, energetic riffs in the second, and slow, disconnected melodies in the third, which the composer compared to whale songs.
The evening ended with Lanzilotti’s “beyond the accident of time,” in which the quartet dispersed to four corners to sing, recite, and play specially constructed bells, led from center stage by the composer on her own bell. Inspired by Isamu Noguchi’s unrealized “Bell Tower for Hiroshima,” Lanzilotti deployed bell archetypes in a somber sonic meditation.
For some, the suspended time of each composition may have seemed monotonous over the intermissionless 90-minute concert. But if you could internally slow down, this was an enjoyable, spiritual experience.
Hertzog is a freelance writer.
