“Is it possible for us to use the tools of classical art music to make people feel better?” San Francisco composer Danny Clay posed that plainspoken yet nuanced and provocative question as the formative spark for Music for Hard Times, a multimedia project he created collaboratively with The Living Earth Show, the San Francisco based new-music duo of electric guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson.
Excerpts from review by Steve Smith
for Musical America
Initially realized for a recording issued in January 2022, the piece was presented in its live premiere at Merkin Hall in New York City on February 8, part of a series called “Artist as Curator” produced by Kaufman Music Center and New York Public Radio’s long-running contemporary-music program New Sounds Live.
The composition, the soul of simplicity, comprises eight “Calming Strategies” for producing sounds. (Audience members were provided with a program detailing the strategies.) Some involve musical notation – a few chords or brief sequences of notes – while others are solely text prompts. Strategy #3, for instance, reads: The sound of one or more church bells, on a sunny morning, off in the distance. (Find a recording of a place, or a memory, and just sit with it for a while.)
Demystifying and democratizing technical requirements had another purpose, tied to the moment in which Music for Hard Times was conceived: March 2020. Confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic, Clay and his collaborators wanted to counteract lockdown isolation by creating a sense of community.
That notion is embedded in two versions of the piece on the album, designated Book 1 and Book 2. Clay assembled the first in the studio using around 16 hours of digital files the Living Earth Show players had recorded in isolation—both musical performances and environmental sounds. Book 2 involved over 100 hours of recordings provided by more than 100 members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus and San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra who had been coached by Andrews and Meyerson.
Complex as its construction was, Music for Hard Times in practice is unfailingly bucolic and sweet. Clay’s music, consistent with much of his oeuvre, is a healing balm in which a listener can float, bathe, and feel caressed.
Throughout the performance of Book 1, video projected overhead and on both sides of the screen offered sweeping vistas of California coast lines and aerial shots of towering trees, as well as bug’s eye views of creeping caterpillars and salamanders. (Onscreen captions indicated which section was being played when, aiding comprehension if you were moved to pay close attention.)
In Book 2 that wonder extended to a few dozen singers and instrumentalists from the Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School Select Choir and Orchestra. With Andrews, Meyerson and conductor David Baker, the young musicians enacted and enhanced Clay’s musical strategies bravely and intelligently, with playful improvised sounds and strong, true musical tones. Fischer’s video, in one more imaginative touch, was frequently segmented, Zoom-style, into small adjacent boxes: a subtle reflection of how Clay’s uncanny conception had brought separated players together as one.
Read review in full on Musical America here