January 26, 2018
Southland Ensemble: Wadada Leo Smith
Southland Ensemble is excited to present the music of Wadada Leo Smith on Friday January 26th. Exploring WLS's notational style, Ankhrasmation, come experience our realization of his beautiful scores Pacifica and page 9 of Kosmic Music.
We will be joined for this performance by special guests Casey Butler, Corey Fogel, Josh Gerowitz, and Dave Tranchina.
“Ankhrasmation is a musical language as opposed to a musical notation system. […] The first part, Ankh, comes from the Egyptian cross. Ras comes from the Ethiopian head, meaning the leader. And Mas comes from mother.” WLS
Wadada Leo Smith’s music language, Ankhrasmation, is a lifelong “experiment with instruments and people, sometime extracted from their history, sometime using their history as well.” Smith’s language admirably reserves space for individual contributions from members of the ensemble while simultaneously advancing the developing concerns of the composer. Smith’s music is truly a social context, an opportunity for each person to contribute something unique from his or her personal experience to the performance. This horizontal orientation renders the ensemble, to take a phrase from George Lewis, a “power stronger than itself.”
The primacy of Rhythm Units, those marks in Ankhrasmation that most closely resemble “conventional music notation,” emphasize a core component of Smith’s musical philosophy and language: the relationship between sound and silence. Though there are a variety of possible Rhythm Units, and a variety of manners in which a musician may choose to interpret them, all Rhythm Units share the following feature: any articulation of a sound is followed by a proportional amount of silence. A short note is followed by a short silence. A Long note is followed by a long silence. The sense of phrase duration, like many other components of Smith’s language, is at once highly personal and shared throughout the group: constantly developing, evolving.
In this concert we trace Smith’s language across two pieces, each in dialogue with a nebulous setting. Pacifica stretches the technique required by Smith’s Music Tower, challenging ensemble members to map their instrumental gestures to the propagation of light at various oceanic depths, stretching from the surface to the very bottom. Pacifica finds the ensemble split in half, resulting in two different performances that bookend the concert. Kosmic Music, on the other hand, takes as its point of departure the vast blackness of space, and features the entire ensemble. Smaller groups, or even solos, may arise out of this reconfigurable panel, whose orientation may be changed freely by ensemble members throughout the performance.
“...Robert Johnson, Son House, and all those great guitar players, every one of them had a different way that they tuned their guitars for their special sound. When they played together, you would hear the uniqueness of each one of them. If they were in the same group, you would hear each one distinctly. That’s language. And that language is what art is all about. It’s that uniqueness, that concern with how you see or project yourself, and what that environment has that you must either encounter, engage, or somehow make peace with.” WLS