Pauline Kim Harris: Heroine
Sono Luminus
Pauline Kim Harris's audacious reimaginings of J.S. Bach's Chaconne (from the Partita No. 2 in D Minor) and Johannes Ockeghem's Deo Gratias are, it's probably safe to say, unlike anything else in Sono Luminus's catalogue and refreshingly so. In place of conventional performances of the original works, on Heroine the violinist and co-composer Spencer Topel have re-created the works as ambient-and-classical hybrids where electronics plays as vital a role as the violin.
Harris and Topel come to such provocative goings-on honestly, she known for work with her husband, FLUX Quartet member Conrad Harris, in the classical avant-punk violin duo String Noise, and he an academic, artist, and designer who blends sound, installation, and architecture in his projects (a recent one saw him and his team developing the first-ever quantum musical synthesizer at The Yale Quantum Institute). Harris has done much to subvert conventional expectations about the classical violinist by performing in museums, churches, nightclubs, and outdoors, and by embracing a spirit of genre openness. The connection between time, memory, and sound play out in her works, the two pieces on Heroine illustrations. In her own words, the material she and Topel created comes “as close to stopping time as I can imagine.”
Their treatment of Bach's Chaconne tantalizes in the way it ever so subtly teases out connections to the original. Realized using live and pre-recorded violin with electronics, Ambient Chaconne continually references the Bach composition but does so allusively, resulting in a performance where the original acts as a shadowy phantom. While the Chaconne is present as a structural scaffold, it's heard as if through a translucent scrim, the definition of its lines blurred by the elements appearing alongside it. In obscuring the original material in such manner, Harris makes it assume the character of a hazy memory that retains a basic shape but without precise detail, and with the tendrils of her violin hinting at Bach without quoting directly, tension permeates the forty-two-minute performance. String phrases intone amidst the glisten, burble, and flicker of electronic sonorities, the mass of sound unfurling slowly and instating an aura of peacefulness and melancholy. In advancing so unhurriedly, the piece convincingly communicates a sense of time-suspension, and though a unified character is established, it's not static either, with the music shape-shifting subtly through numerous episodes.
As engrossing as the performance of the opening work is, the ambient-drone reimagining of Deo Gratias (ca. 1497) is even more captivating. That's because Ockeghem's use of a traditional canon (to evoke the singing of angels in heaven) has been updated by Harris and Topel in their electroacoustic makeover to produce a seeming “canon of thousands,” the result an ethereal, half-hour soundscape that swirls in never-ending motion. Strings sing rapturously to lulling effect, the dense mass convincingly suggesting how the music of heaven might perhaps sound. There are moments during Deo where Harris's violin exudes a rather rustic, pastoral quality, especially with the high-pitched shimmer of a strings choir behind it. With the volume turned up, the listener could begin to feel engulfed by the music but probably never more happy to be so.November 2019