Composer Missy Mazzoli
I wasn’t familiar with any of Missy Mazzoli’s music prior to approaching her work Ecstatic Science, but I had heard her name floating around here and there in various conversations in programming over the past few years. She definitely seems to be one of the more intriguing and prominent names among American composers that has emerged over this past decade, at least from what I’ve seen as a clarinetist who admittedly isn’t as well-versed in contemporary classical repertoire as I might like to (or should?) be. In getting to know just this piece of hers over the past weeks though, I can’t say that it surprises me that she’s gained the acclaim that she has so far.
To me this piece explores the two concepts of stasis and momentum and how they engage with one another. Its trajectory is relatively straight-forward- we start from a point of static harmony in the strings that builds up to a flurry of activity by the half-way point that gradually settles back down. The way we get there is through string glissandos which sound as is they’re emulating that “charge-up” noise you hear in electronics from movies, burblings in the flute and clarinet, and subtle expansive phrases by the trumpet. There are also our tried-and-true scalar passages, broken chords, and arpeggios that send us forward in an almost classically minimalist manner. For a piece that Mazzoli herself says is constructed using a lot of math, there’s also a lot of visceral, almost primal gestures. Explosions of sound and heavy-hitting vertical chordal punches that run perpendicular to the horizontal stillness of sustained harmonies.
It might seem a little simplistic that I’m describing the piece this way.
After all, one could probably argue that a lot of music is essentially made up of parts that move and don’t move. However for me I suppose Ecstatic Science is a little more explicit in tackling these ideas, almost as if it’s using these core concepts in seeking to be one of the answers to the question of “how do you move a piece forward in a way that doesn’t rely on well-established practices and devices but still sounds genuinely expressive and exciting?” Now I’m obviously projecting my own thoughts and feelings here and it’s very possible that this isn’t a question that she’s concerned with at all, but as a 21st century classical musician that’s generally been wary of a lot of 21st century music that’s composed for our classical instruments, I feel like it’s a question that does inevitably work its way into the music that comes from our time whether or not we intend for it to.
In discovering the piece and now in writing about it, I’ve been thinking back to a short clip of physicist Richard Feynman that I first saw many years ago that’s resonated with me ever since. In short, he talks about a sort of stereotypical dichotomy between artists and scientists, where artists see the “beauty” in things and scientists make these same things dull with their meticulous analysis. For him though, he contends that he very much is able to appreciate the beauty in something such as a flower through understanding its structure at a molecular level, and perhaps is able to appreciate it even more so than the artist is able to. By looking at something through a scientific lens, it only adds excitement, mystery, and awe to something as aesthetically pleasing as a flower. Coming back to Ecstatic Science, I think it’s a perfect example of this sentiment, and if this piece alone is any indication or representation of where our genre of music stands and where it has the potential to go, I think I can safely say that I’m optimistic for what comes next.
-Roy Park
