HUANG Ruo (b. 1976)
A Dust in Time
Del Sol Quartet
rec. 13-14 May 2021, St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Belvedere Tiburon, California, USA
BRIGHT SHINY THINGS BSTC0158 [61:48]
Drawing, painting or otherwise doodling while music plays is a time-honoured practice. Whole concerts are presented in which, while musicians play, an artist creates a visual image in response to what is heard in the music. Music therapists and educators often ask their patients or pupils to respond to music by drawing. Common as this practice is, so far as I am aware, no recording has been released commercially with the specific instruction for the audience to draw, paint or doodle as the recording plays. So this release is something of a new venture for a record company. However, with this recording the audience is not encouraged to respond to the music by creating something visual – I suppose any CD issued with a blank page in its booklet might be said to serve this purpose – but simply to colour in pre-drawn patterns created by Felicia Lee, a high school student at San Francisco’s Lowell High School (who, we read, also “likes math, dance and listening to and playing classical music”). The music is not therefore intended to inspire creativity, but simply provide some background noise while the hearer colours in Lee’s complex black-and-white patterns (the choice of colours is left entirely to the individual). The flimsy booklet to which the disc is loosely attached is described as a “Coloring Book”, and unless colours are applied using some kind of erasable device, the intention is clearly that hearing the music and colouring the devices is a one-off experience.
Musically, I cannot imagine too many people would wish it otherwise. The music is atmospheric but does not noticeably benefit from repeated hearings. It would appear that Huang Ruo’s intention all along was to create something essentially ephemeral which changes itself on every performance occasion; so the idea of capturing it on permanent record is something of anathema. We read, for example, that in the year leading up to the recording, the work went through numerous manifestations. It began while Huang was falling asleep, transformed itself into a “tearful Zoom call”, was played in the echoing labyrinth of an empty Grace Cathedral, performed to friends and strangers who had gathered together “in a park to bask in musical respite during the tense days following the 2020 presidential election”, and “echoed off the Yampa River’s canyon walls, enveloping our fellow rafters in sound as they bobbed in the eddy of a sandbank”. It would seem to me that most of these occasions would not have been beneficial to the close scrutiny of a musical work, which makes the concept of a studio recording of it somewhat contradictory.
Lee has created a series of 16 Mandalas (highly decorative spirals many of which include patterns inspired by trees and various plants) which are often astoundingly complex and will require much concentration on behalf of the colourist to ensure tiny spaces are properly filled. The work itself is divided for this CD only into 13 sections, which in their subtitles – “Chron-Age-Epoch-Period-Era-Eon-Supereon-Eon-Era-Period-Epoch-Age-Chron” - indicate the palindromic character of the work. It is also in the form of a Passacaglia, the idea being that this musical form, like the colouring of the Mandalas, provides a “pathway to ever-expanding possibilities”. Scored for string quartet, and played with obvious conviction by the Del Sol Quartet, A Dust in Time begins in morose and somewhat lugubrious mood, with the instruments slowly interweaving in a sparse counterpoint. During the ascending “Epoch” it assumes a slightly brighter feel, in the ascending “Era” it picks up speed a little, and with the “Eon-Supereon-Eon” trilogy, it reaches an ecstatic climax in both animation and dynamic, before the whole process unwinds itself leisurely.
I have no doubt that everything here is a sincere and genuine response to the troubles of the times in which it was conceived – the global pandemic and the domestic crisis facing the USA at the time of the last presidential election. But it is difficult to see this music having any more than a passing effect on those who encounter it. If it provides, as the booklet promises, an hour long “life-embracing meditation”, it does not provide a life changing one.
Marc Rochester
