The Beauty Between the Notes

International artists unite with the Dallas Symphony and local talent to imagine SOLUNA, a music and arts festival with a soul.

BY LEE CULLUM

Where to go in search of SOLUNA? That’s the sometimes weird, always wonderful festival happening all over Dallas through April. Never as cruel a month as the poet T. S. Eliot said, though “mixing memory and desire” might be just the thing for spring, which by then will have emphatically arrived. Let’s start with the superstars which, of course, would mean, above all, Fabio Luisi, the new Music Director of the Dallas Symphony. On April 18 and 19 he will conduct the orchestra for the first time since being named to that post. The lineup? Beethoven’s 7th plus 20th-century works by William Grant Still and Frank Martin.

So, can we expect more modern music from Fabio Luisi at DSO? I asked in an email. “Absolutely!,” he replied. The term “classical music” is nowhere to be seen in reports about SOLUNA, but New Yorker critic Alex Ross charged, even so, that calling anything “classical” is trapping “tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past.” Maestro Luisi strongly disagrees. “Classical music,” he wrote, “strictly speaking, it describes a very limited time range. Now we extend it to everything that was written until…Ligeti?...Berg?...Music puts a mirror in front of us and makes us reflect on ourselves…Art,” he concluded, “is always contemporary.”

And who could be more contemporary than Terence Blanchard, jazz composer and titan of the trumpet. Blanchard is everywhere, writing the score of Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman, composing Fire Shut Up in My Bones for the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and producing Caravan: A Revolution on the Road for SOLUNA, with his own music, dance by Rennie Harris Puremovement, and astonishing video art by Andrew Scott of the University of Texas at Dallas.

Andrew Scott came to UTD five years ago from the Savannah College of Art and Design, having studied sculpture at Ohio State, something he still pursues in a space big enough for welding at Trinity Groves. He met Terence Blanchard when both of them were in Brooklyn. They mostly lost track of each other, but teamed up years later when Blanchard posted a call for an album cover and Scott replied with the winning proposal. The two of them have been working together ever since, and to fantastic effect, as I discover the minute I walk into Scott’s enormous warehouse of a studio in the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building, whose architects must have designed with someone like him in mind.

With three students—no, four—working quietly to one side on the show for the Majestic Theatre, where Caravan can be seen April 9, Andrew Scott explains the powerful and purposeful screen overhead where symbols of every description declare a world of complicated harmony—Celtic, Tao yin and yang, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, with Ankh, the ancient Egyptian sign for the breath of life, soon to be added. Scott leaves nothing out but much to chance as these symbols, deeply reminiscent of the Jungian unconscious, yield to a dove of peace flying slowly, seductively, across the screen. At the same time, Blanchard’s music, arriving by computer that afternoon, softens to a piano, poignant as well as faintly promising. Black and white dissolve into a panoply of color on which dancers will be projected from the stage as will the musicians of Blanchard’s E Collective. Call it psychedelic. Call it the aesthetic of hypertech. But, above all, call it by Andrew Scott’s watchword, improvisation.

Verdigris Ensemble will perform in Anthracite Fields.

Photograph by Dickie Hill

DSO composer in residence Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Photograph by Peter Serling.

New York–based artist and composer Aki Onda will activate the galleries at the Crow Museum of Asian Art.

Photograph by Brian Whar

Queens-based vocalist Samita Sinha will perform with Aki Onda.

Photograph by Renee Morello.

Academy Award–nominated trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard performs at The University of Texas at Dallas in The Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building on April 21, 2017.

Photograph by Roxanne Minnish.

Certainly improvisation, that juncture of rapid response and crazy intuition, is the order of the hour for Kim Corbet. Five years ago, he created the Meadows POINT Ensemble at SMU as a gateway for students to express who they really are. Released from rights and wrongs, dos and don’ts, they could break the shackles of convention and free their talent from limiting expectations. We meet at the Hotel Lumen near the campus on Hillcrest to talk about American Landscapes with Lonnie Holley, Corbet’s gig for SOLUNA, scheduled April 19 at the Dallas Museum of Art. He arrives by bicycle, explaining that this is how he goes everywhere unless it’s raining. Then he calls Uber.

Born in Little Rock, Corbet arrived in Dallas still quite young but savvy enough to know how to project himself as an Arkansan—casualness is everything—sometimes teaching or performing barefoot. “People appreciate eccentricity,” he tells me, “but only after you have proved you can handle it.” Eccentrics, he adds, “don’t fit their mold but they are not dangerous.” It’s like improvisation: “You have to be comfortable.”

Corbet started out playing a traditional instrument, the trombone, and it “put me through three schools,” he says, “the last being the University of North Texas.” There he split his time between the One O’Clock Lab Band and the electronic music department. He loved the synthesizer, the way it allowed him to “go into music [and] explore.” He notes, “The trombone was for my head, electronic for my soul. It was ‘a new utopia.’”

The question now is what will it be like for his POINT Ensemble—three students this time playing acoustic bass, cello, and oboe—working with Lonnie Holley, acclaimed performance artist as well as sculptor, born in Birmingham, Alabama, and now expositor of the American South in all its horrific connotations? Yet he has triumphed in spite of, because of, all that, using the seeds of his own searing experience to germinate an art that is as universal as it is indigenous.

Willing always to speak his mind, Holley said to the Guardian, “We are playing in the quicksand fields of stupidity. Playing in the playground of foolishness.” Nonetheless, he concluded that interview with this: “Rejoice with the rejoicers. Thumbs up to Mother Universe.” An adventurer with found objects in his sculpture and found sounds in his music, Lonnie Holley is “a street poet,” says Corbet, “so successful, late in life,” with his first recording in his early 60s. “He’s all over the place now. He’s an improviser and might end by being a blues poet in the DMA show. It depends on how open everybody is.”

How open everybody is. “How they interact with one another.” That, explains Corbet, is the secret of improvisation. But “it’s up to the poet to create a direction.” The poet, that April night at the DMA, will be Lonnie Holley. Ready to respond, however, will be three musicians of Kim Corbet’s Meadows POINT Ensemble, with ideas and energies of their own.

Ideas are crucial to Aki Onda, who will bring a Japanese sensibility to the sensations of light and sound at the Crow Museum of Asian Art on April 4. Sometimes he picks up on cassette what he hears in the field. Other times electronic music is his metier. Always he leads from memory, distilled from a childhood in Japan, with Korean antecedents, into the linear context of the West. But the shape of sound never crystallizes for him with the precision expected by the Western mind. “The shape is not fixed,” he wrote in an email, “and it changes all the time.” Heavily influenced by Mexico, he pointed out, “the highly contemporary and the archaically traditional cultures, the refined logic and murky superstitions, the aristocrat lifestyle and the poor…Amidst the chaos of all these forces, the border that separates reality and imagination lost its meaning and anything seemed to be possible to me.” Anything is possible, too, when Aki Onda performs at the Crow.

Egill Sæbjörnsson, Ugh and Bõögâr descend upon Downtown Dallas.

Courtesy of the artist and i8 Gallery, Reykjavík, Iceland.

Improvisational and multidisciplinary artist Lonnie Holley will perform at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Solidly Western but stubbornly iconoclastic, the Verdigris Ensemble is medieval, mystical, and modern, all at once. Redolent of Gregorian chants, the group sings insistently of today, through the prism of earlier traumas in earlier times. Verdigris’ most important project to date is coming up at Moody Performance Hall on April 15 when Julia Wolfe, composer-in-residence at the Dallas Symphony, will present Anthracite Fields, her Pulitzer Prize–winning oratorio about life in Pennsylvania’s coal mines at the turn of the 20th century. This is not a polemic to save the coal industry nor a jeremiad against it. What Wolfe is describing, in song, is a tough world, underground, damp and dangerous, but essential then to lighting the nation.

Led by Sam Brukhman, creator of Verdigris, the ensemble will work with Wolfe’s Bang on a Can gang of musicians who know, he says, how to use music “to serve the text,” and vice versa. Wolfe, he explains, “takes words and repeats them… takes a word and makes it mean more, through repetition… such as repeating the names of all those who died in the mines called John…In the 4th Movement we all have flowers. Wolfe stretches it out—flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers. Then the word falls apart. She’s transforming words…She creates a mood, an atmosphere. She does it with instruments that are unusual: a bass clarinet, a bicycle wheel, a can. It’s effective in transporting an audience who has no idea what classical music is. This is the type of piece that Dallas needs to hear.”

Who could be more unlikely to know with such certitude what Dallas needs to hear than Sam Brukhman? And yet he does. Brukhman grew up in Cranford, New Jersey, in a family that immigrated to the US from the former Soviet Union. Composed of “stock traders and brokers” plus a brother ten years older with a cryptocurrency fund, this was a clan little prepared for an odd-man-out like Sam. Only his grandmother understood him. That’s because she too was musical, having taught piano at the Glinka Academy in Leningrad. A choir director saved Sam from flunking out of middle school and set him on a path toward the work of his life. So, after Westminster Choir College, when friends fixed him up with a teaching job in Dallas, Sam Brukhman moved here, understanding innately what a business town like this—so like his family—would need to hear. It was not unlikely at all.

SOLUNA takes the art of collaboration to a new stratosphere When the Trolls Go Rolling In takes over River Bend, home to the Dallas Art Fair’s own 214 Projects in the Design District. Imagined by Iceland’s representative for the 57th Biennale, Egill Sæbjörnsson’s man-eating trolls collide with classical musicians in a visual sensory work imbued with humor and video projections. Says Brandon Kennedy, Dallas Art Fair’s Director of Exhibitor Relations, “I first encountered the massive, human-eating trolls Ūgh & Bõögâr in Venice during the summer of 2017. By the time I had arrived, they were already wreaking havoc across the sinking lagoon, scaring tourists and art lovers, taking over the Icelandic Pavilion (by way of their artist friend Egill) and generally making an outsize impression everywhere they strolled and grumbled. They were completely ‘OUT OF CONTROLL!,’ so I immediately offered them an open invitation to visit Dallas.”

So I discovered the secrets of SOLUNA, some of them, from the elegant to the elemental, full of possibilities and the pleasure of surprise. It’s a festival that’s grown from the tentative to the tantalizing. Indeed, SOLUNA is coming now into its own, just like Dallas.