Christopher Cerrone’s career got a huge boost right at its
beginning: His opera “Invisible Cities,” inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel, was
a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize in 2014, when he was barely in his 30s.
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But despite its lucid grace and a compelling production — it was
performed in a bustling train station for a wandering audience listening over
headphones — I found myself wanting to love its unhurried nimbuses of melody
more than I did. The opera’s drifting quality ended up feeling too shapeless.
In a recent interview, Cerrone, 37, agreed that “Invisible
Cities” suffered a bit from an overreliance on what he called “this lyrical,
sort-of-melancholy thing.”
“Honestly,” he added, “little by little I think I figured out
how to compose.”
It certainly didn’t take him too long to figure out. “Hoyt-Schermerhorn,”
for solo piano and electronics, suavely subverted its initially sedate cast of
mood as a stirring opening for Vicky Chow’s album “AORTA” in 2016. And in “Goldbeater’s
Skin,” performed at Trinity Wall Street in 2018, he alternated luminous melodic
development with frizzy rhythmic outbursts. At one point, a merger of muted,
slowly strummed acoustic guitar and pitched percussion felt like the
announcement of a new level of craft.
Cerrone’s most recent full-length album, “The Arching Path,” was
released on In a Circle Records in May. The title piece — a three-movement
work, played by the pianist Timo Andres — starts with brittle repetition before
flowering into lushly affecting patterns before the end of the first movement.
Tender ascending notes in the left hand contribute a sense of earnestness to
the right hand’s chordal, Minimalist-inflected mechanics.
“That’s the classic Cerrone heart-on-the-sleeve moment,” Andres
said in an interview. “That’s where it’s all going.”
Andres — also a composer and a close friend of Cerrone’s since
they met as graduate students at the Yale School of Music — considers the piece
a leap forward.
“It’s not music that’s virtuosic for virtuosity’s sake — which
is something I’m not really interested in, as a pianist or a composer,” he
said. “But the musical form and the musical gesture just sort of requires a
degree of virtuosity to play itself out. To me, when these two things fuse with
each other, it can be very moving.”
The pandemic gave Cerrone time to edit and release recordings of
performances that had been captured over the past few years. Along with “The
Arching Path,” the additions to his discography include a solo
percussion-plus-electronics track, “A Natural History of Vacant Lots,” that
sounds like a full-length ambient record compressed into a single, without
seeming hurried. The second movement of “Liminal Highway,” performed by the
flutist Tim Munro (who doubles on piccolo and beer bottles), begins with
expansive, hard-core repetition before spiraling into its melodic material.
“More and more over the years,” Cerrone said, “I’ve tried to do
the same thing with rhythm and pulse that I’ve done with harmony. And I think
it’s helped clarify and refine my overall compositional language.”
A recent work for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra — “A Body,
Moving,” featuring tuba, trumpet and a percussionist who uses a bike pump —
saves its most emotive material for its closing minutes. That is also true of
Cerrone’s violin concerto for Jennifer Koh, “Breaks and Breaks,” performed with
the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2018. (The concerto shares material with the
string quartet “Can’t and Won’t,” which was also released as a single last
year.)
Closing minutes — of a movement, or of an entire work — tend to
be a big deal for Cerrone. His compositions can seem like vessels that catch
sparse rainfall for long stretches, thus setting critical terms of engagement
for a listener, until a limit of storage is reached. Then, his writing sends
this carefully husbanded material back outward in generous pourings.
“I think he’s always really had this sense of going for a
dramatic moment in his forms,” Andres said, while adding that this hasn’t
always been clear in Cerrone’s music: “There’s some early works that I can
think of where he was sort of too beholden to his modernist influences to
really let it fly, if you know what I mean. Morton Feldman is not going to
really have a such heart-on-the-sleeve moment. And I think Feldman was a big North
Star for Chris, early on.”
Born in Huntington, on Long Island, in 1984, Cerrone grew up
taking piano lessons, but also played guitar in punk bands. He loved the
ambient music of Aphex Twin, as well as Radiohead, Björk and the arranger Gil
Evans’s collaborations with Miles Davis — all music that was, he said, “so
closely influenced by classical music that I started to get excited by the
Stravinsky records that were lying around my house.” (Cerrone’s father did
advertising work for Tower Records, and was paid partially in classical LPs.)
“My relationship to instrumentality — and, like, time — is not
particularly drawn from classical music per se,” he said. “It’s a combination
of these other genres of music, and the computer.” Growing up in the
MTV era
also had an impact on his work, and on his hopes for its intelligibility to
nonspecialists.
“I’ve just come to embrace it more and more,” he said. “I should
make my music really accessible to the equivalent person who’s not in classical
music.”
“These pieces,” he said, “are
all about taking really simple things and simple materials — repeated notes or
single notes or things like that — and trying to build these dense, formally
crystalline worlds out of them.”
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