New works debut at Carnegie Hall

Collaboration with young composers and musicians yields vibrant new Silk Road Ensemble repertoire

The lingering reverberation of an ancient bell. A cymbal struck, then submerged into water.

Such sound paintings were part of the world premier of eight compositions commissioned by the Silk Road Project and Carnegie Hall as part of Tradition and Innovation, a workshop that strives to give young musicians the tools to understand not only their own musical language, but the language of other cultures as well.

The debuts took place in four performances in Zankel Hall September 16 and 17.

Last spring, the Silk Road Ensemble began exploring new works by emerging composers Christopher Adler and Angel Lam, chosen through an application process by Carnegie Hall and the Silk Road Project. The Ensemble and a group of young instrumentalists, also selected from a pool of talented candidates, gathered at the Tanglewood Music Center in early September to learn Adler’s and Lam’s pieces, as well as new works by established composers Gabriela Frank, Osvaldo Golijov Jeeyoung Kim, Kayhan Kalhor, Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky and Evan Ziporyn.

Adler’s Music for a Royal Palace combined sheng, viola, marimba, and percussion in homage to Thailand’s Bang Pa-In Palace – “an opulent juxtaposition of Thai, Chinese, and Western architectural styles,” according to the composer.

Shakuhachi, strings, and percussion told the bittersweet story of Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain, a composition in two movements that Lam dedicated to the memory of her grandmother.

Kim’s Ancient Bell begins and ends with a recording of Korea’s E-Mil-Le Bell, whose solemn but delicate reverberations linger longer than any other bell's in the world. Before its premiere, Kim shared with the audience the bell’s tragic legend: Cast of bronze in the eighth century C.E., the 25-ton bell failed to ring. It was melted and recast several times, but not until an infant was sacrificed into the molten metal did the bell achieve its pure sound. Kim said she wrote the piece for violin, cell, ney, and jan-go in an attempt “to celebrate the beauty of the sound of the bell and to comfort the lost soul of the baby.”

Each composition challenged listeners to follow musical conversations spoken in cadences to which Western ears may not be attuned. Ziporyn’s Sulvasutra, for instance, featured tabla player Sandeep Das leading violins, viola, cello, and pipa through modal harmonies built around rhythmic cycles of four, five, and three. Golijov’s Air to Air discovered musical soulmates in the sheng and Galician bagpipes – a pairing that generated so much energy throughout Zankel Hall that musicians and audience alike could not help but  rise to their feet and cheer as one when the concert ended.