“Everything changes, nothing changes”: Tyshawn Sorey wrote the string quartet that takes this title in 2018. But the feeling is so personalized for last year that when the JACK Quartet announced that it would broadcast a performance of the work in December, I forgot briefly and I assumed it was a debut, created for those tumultuous but static times.
I should have known better. Mr. Sorey already had enough on his plate without preparing a new quartet. Only the final two months of 2020 brought the debut of a pair of concert works, one for violin and one for cello, as well as a new iteration of “Autoschediasms”, his series of improvisations jointly conducted, with Alarm Will Sound.
That is not all that has happened to him since November. Mills College, where Sorey is the resident composer, broadcast his solo piano ensemble. Opera Philadelphia filmed a completely black and white version of its song sequence “Cycles of My Being”, about black masculinity and racial hatred. JACK did “Everything Changes” for the Library of Congress, alongside the violin solo “For Conrad Tao”. Houston’s Da Camera aired a 2016 performance of “Perle Noire”, a tribute to Josephine Baker that Sorey arranged with soprano Julia Bullock. Her most recent album, “Unfiltered”, was released in early March, days before the lockdown.
He was the songwriter of the year.
This is a coincidence – part of this explosion of work was planned a long time ago – and not. Mr. Sorey is on everyone’s radar, at least since he won a MacArthur “genius” scholarship in 2017, but the shock to the performing arts since the end of winter has suddenly brought him forward as an artist in the nexus of music industry artistic and social concerns.
Undefined, he is attractive to almost everyone. He works on the diffuse and productive frontier of improvised (“jazz”) and noted (“classical”) music, a composer who is also a performer. He is valuable for ensembles and institutions because of his versatility – he can do somber solos, as well as large-scale vocal work. And he is black, at a time when these groups and institutions are desperate to approach racial representation late in their programming.
He is so wanted and so successful that the trolls came after him, dragging him on Facebook to see the exaggerated biography on his website. (Admittedly, it is a bit of an adjective: “celebrated for its incomparable virtuosity, effortless dominance”, etc.)
The style for which he is best known since his 2007 album “That / Not”, his debut release as a band leader, owes a lot to composer Morton Feldman (1926-87): slim, spacious, glacial, often silent, but often sinister, focusing the listener purely on the unfolding of the music. Mr. Sorey called this vision an “imaginary landscape where practically nothing exists”.
There is a hotline connecting “Permutations for Solo Piano”, a 43-minute study in quiet resonance on that 2007 album, and the first of two improvised solos in his recent Mills recital, shot on an upright piano at his home. Even the second solo, much shorter, more frantic and brilliant, seems to want to return to the dark shadows.
“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes”, a floating, slightly jarring 27-minute gauze, is in this style, as is the new work for violin and orchestra, “For Marcos Balter”, premiered on November 7 by Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Orchestra Symphonic. Mr. Sorey insists on a program note that this is a “not-certain”, without the evident virtuosity of a traditional concert, contrasting rhythms or vivid interaction between soloist and ensemble.
“For Marcos Balter” it is balanced, constantly slow, a commune of players instead of a metaphorical exchange between an individual and society. Ms. Koh’s deliberate long tones, like cautious exhalations, are received with spectral effects on the marimba. Silent piano chords amplify silent string chords. At the end, a tympanum roll is silenced to sound almost like a gong, with Mrs. Koh’s violin a copper tremor above it.
It is immaculate and elegant, but I prefer Sorey’s new cello and orchestra piece, “For Roscoe Mitchell”, premiered on November 19 by Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony. There is more tension here between discreet and restless minimalism and an impulse for exuberance, fullness – more tension between the soloist backing up and saying what he thinks.
The play is less pristine than “For Marcos Balter” and more restless. The set’s scenery is crystal clear, foggy sighs, while the solo cello line expands in melancholy arias without words; sometimes the tone is passionate, nocturnal in dark tones, sometimes an ethereal lullaby. “For Roscoe Mitchell” looks like a composer challenging himself while expressing himself with confidence – testing the balance between introversion and extroversion, privacy and exposure.
But it is not right to make it look like an isolated case in this regard; Sorey’s music was never just Feldman’s quiet. In Alarm Will Sound’s inspirationally well executed virtual performance of “Autoschediasms”, Mr. Sorey led 17 players across five states by video chat, calm at his desk while writing symbols on cards and lifting them to the camera, a dark and silent language which resulted in a low hum, varying in texture, and then, breathtakingly, a spacious, moist section marked by sharp bassoon tones.
And he is not afraid to get into a kind of neo-romantic vibe. “Cycles of My Being”, with tenor Lawrence Brownlee and texts by the poet Terrance Hayes, accompanies the ardently declarative songs of American art from the mid-20th century by Samuel Barber and Lee Hoiby, as well as “Perle Noire”, near the end, a sweetly sad instrumental hymn by Copland.
“Cycles”, which sounded turgid when I heard it in a voice and piano version three years ago, flourished in Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of the original instrumentation, which adds some energizing strings and a squeaky clarinet. And after a year of protests, what in 2018 seemed rigid – in both texts and music – now seems like a more relentless force. (Opera Philadelphia presents yet another debut by Sorey, “Save the Boys,” with counterpart John Holiday, on February 12)
“Perle Noire” still seems to be the best in Sorey. Transforming Josephine Baker’s animated numbers into unresolved meditations, here is the smooth, jazzy swing and glacial expansion, an exploration of race and identity that is ultimately indecisive – a climate of endless disappointment and endless desires. (“My father, how long,” Mrs. Bullock intones repeatedly near the end.)
In such strong works, the extravagant praise for which some have criticized Sorey on social media – that biography, for example, or the JACK Quartet praising “the precision of the knife edge of Sorey’s chess master mind” – seems justified. And, anyway, isn’t it a relief to speak of a 40-year-old composer with the immoderate enthusiasm that we usually reserve for the pillars of the classic canon?