Jaffe: Light Dances “Chamber Concerto No. 2”
MP3 Music
Bridge Records
Stephen Jaffe’s Light Dances has the capacity, rare in contemporary music, to bring a delighted smile to the listener. In a sense, everything else a reviewer can say follows from that. One imagines that the composer has become accustomed to taking his bows before audiences who not only get his music but wish it wasn’t over so soon. Every bar of this 22-minute chamber piece for strings, woodwinds, piano, and percussion is vibrantly alive, constantly keeping you on your toes, leaning forward to anticipate what might be around the next corner. It’s actually fun to disentangle the mystery of why this piece is so much fun.
The first and most obvious clue is rhythm—fast, syncopated, barely stopping for breath. We are somewhere between Charles Ives’s quirky little song Ann Street and Mondrian’s kinetic painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie. The second clue is color. A good composer must have a good ear, and Jaffe’s is attuned to the mix-and-match hues he can splash around with excited vitality (we might throw Jackson Pollock’s action painting into the allusions). The third clue is song-and-dance, in the old vaudevillian sense—you are always on the verge of humming a snatch of melody and tapping your foot at the same time.
Reaching for allusions to the other arts fits Jaffe’s cross-pollinating aesthetic. He keeps Walt Whitman and his iconic line, “I sing the body electric,” in the back of his mind. In the program note Jaffe compares his working method to poetry as “sound and form, fused!” The exclamation point is as spontaneous as this piece. The title Light Dances comes from a remark by photographer and essayist Brian Peterson: “My whole creative life is a dance around the light.” As the subtitle says, this is a chamber concerto, although unlike Berg in his Chamber Concerto, Jaffe gives various instruments only a brief solo moment, usually in a reflective mood before the scampering rhythmic impulse takes over again. The three movements are “Steps,” “Incipit,” and “A dance around the light.” Although each is infused with dancing and lightness, Jaffe hasn’t composed a set of dances. He is using his quick-witted imagination to evoke a spectrum of meaning that the two words, dance and light, evoke, including spiritual light.
I’ve been making references to American influences, although the use of a tick-tocking woodblock in the middle movement is reminiscent of the fatalistic winding down at the end of Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony, and whistling violin harmonics could have come from the keening opening moment of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2. Americana comes to mind quite often in Light Dances, and it’s a pleasure to feel at home with snippets of jazz, rock, hymnody, and the bustle of the urban street scene.
None of these diverse elements defines Jaffe’s idiom, but out of curiosity I listened to his String Quartet No. 2 (Aeolian and Sylvan Figures), which will appear on the forthcoming 2020 CD that will also include Light Dances. The quartet displays the same fantastic ear for color, quick changes, and a wide spectrum of moods. The upcoming album, for which this digital stream of Light Dances is a preview, will be Bridge’s fourth release devoted to Jaffe’s music. I delved into his Violin Concerto and Cello Concerto featured on previous discs. The composer, who loves to work with musicians in a collaborative compositional method, has found exciting ways to exploit sonority that are highly inventive, and as with Light Dances, the listener is kept constantly alert and engaged.
The performance here from the Da Capo Chamber Players is first rate, as you’d expect from a Naumburg Award-winning ensemble for whom more than 150 works have been written. I could cite each member as being of solo quality: Patricia Spencer, flute and piccolo; Meighan Stoops, clarinet and bass clarinet; Curtis Macomber, violin; Chris Gross, cello; and Steve Beck, piano. As guest artist, percussionist Michael Lipsey is tasked to employ a battery of instruments that I’ll enumerate to give an impression of how kaleidoscopic the soundscape of Light Dances is: bass drum, pedal tambourine, woodblocks, suspended cymbals, finger rings, brake drums, small shakers or maracas, gong, and marimba. The wonder is that each instrument slips so effortlessly in and out of the music’s texture, in keeping with Jaffe’s ability to make carefully worked-out music sound as spontaneous as free-form jazz.
Fanfare readers are aware that contemporary music often calls for special pleading from a sympathetic reviewer, but that’s not the case here. Light Dances is a captivating work that appeals to general listeners, and its capricious inventiveness makes it something quite special. Huntley Dent
This article originally appeared in Issue 42:5 (May/June 2019) of Fanfare Magazine.
JAFFE Light Dances (Chamber Concerto No. 2) • Da Capo C Players; Michael Lipsey (perc) • BRIDGE 4001 (Streaming audio: 22:16) https://mailchi.mp/bridgerecords/new-digital-only-release-stephen-jaffe-light-dances?e=f7e7c88087
Jaffe: Light Dances “Chamber Concerto No. 2”
MP3 Music
Bridge Records
Inspired by his friend photographer Brian Peterson’s evocative phrase, “my whole creative life is a dance around the light,” composer Stephen Jaffe wrote Light Dancesto “reflect dance and light” in music that would “allow its performers to present a work that is vital and virtuosic; poetic and spatial.”
“Steps” (the first of three movements) immediately pulls you into its orbit with an irresistible blend of complex syncopation and melodious optimism that at times recalls Leonard Bernstein’s love of jazzy rhythms and “riffing.” It’s a tour de force that Da Capo performs with irrepressible enthusiasm. “Incipit”’s ethereal introduction and subsequent clarinet meditation segue into an up-tempo, rhythmically absorbing dance that alternates with peacefully melodic passages and extended lyrical piano interludes, before fading away with a reprise of the initial delicate tinsel-toned timbres. The movement as a whole traces its origin to Thomas Tallis’s choral setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah and its “lament mode,” characterized by “the falling melodic fourth”—also a significant interval in the outer movements. In Jaffe’s view, “Spatially, it reminds me of the solemnity of light flowing into a sacred space (‘the whole thing becomes a prayer’).” “A dance around the light” resembles the two preceding movements in its combination of dreamy episodes and high-spirited dances (“textures wherein groups of instruments dance with one another”). At one point the pace slows and the pitched instruments initiate a back and forth conversation with the percussion that resembles the jazz tradition of trading fours. Another brief but attention-grabbing incident occurs around 1:22, an apparent reference to early music playing styles, later echoed by a Pachelbel-like passage towards the end.
Currently available as a download, Light Dances offers an engaging, colorful foretaste of a 2020 Bridge Records release that will include two other Jaffe works. (Bridge has previously published three volumes of The Music of Stephen Jaffe.) He’s a gifted composer who excels at writing intricate, exciting, and poetic parts for virtuoso musicians, and the Da Capo Chamber Players reward him (and us) with an outstanding performance. Robert Schulslaper
