Augusta Read Thomas doesn’t just dance as she composes. She sings, plays, and tries to literally touch the harmonies and rhythms that go into each new piece. For her, the creative act provides a way to embody the moment, experience sound in body and spirit, and embrace the world.
That sense of commitment engenders feelings of spontaneity in her music. The rhythms dart about, changing directions on a dime while keeping listeners engaged throughout the process. True, hearing her music feels kinetic and visceral. And Boston audiences will have the chance to immerse themselves in her sound world with an all-Thomas portrait concert presented by Longy Conservatory’s Divergent Studio on Saturday night [details of the concert and free tickets HERE].
The Pickman Hall event will showcase chamber works and songs that together paint a picture of Thomas’s career over the past 27 years. Highlights include her piano trio …a circle around the sun … (2000), Toft Serenade for violin and piano (2006), Bell Illuminations for piano (2020), and the world premiere of Calliope’s Magic Fanfare, written for new music ensemble loadbang, who will join Longy faculty and student fellows in performing the program.
“I’ve admired [loadbang] for a long time,” Thomas said in an interview over Google Meet on Wednesday. “I listened to their entire website. But one of the things I noticed was that they really didn’t have a straight up fanfare. And I thought it would be interesting to write a four-minute piece that’s kind of got a fanfare feel to it.”
Like her other works, Calliope’s Magic Fanfare places great demands on the performer. The piece, scored for trumpet, trombone, and bass clarinet, even includes a florid part for loadbang baritone Ty Bouque, who will be tasked with singing lines that stretch well into his high range. Textless phrases employ the international phonetic alphabet. “It will mean the same thing in any language,” Thomas said, adding that the piece “is kind of a sparkling, virtuosic, and magical kind of thing.”
Calliope’s other connections to Thomas’s oeuvre are more obvious. Browse her catalogue on her website and you’ll turn up pieces with titles with mythological names like Terpsichore, Helios, and Aurora. “They’re evocative and open titles that invite people into these ancient traditions, Greek, Roman, and everywhere else in the world,” Thomas said. “In every corner of the world you have people celebrating the moon, celebrating the sun. I have [pieces that reflect] the solstice and equinox. I find these things deeply human—it’s across all cultures.”
But while Thomas hesitates to call these experiences religious, she likens them to spiritual musings and mystical objects, like magic boxes, birds of paradise, or orbital beacons. “I don’t have pieces about specific things,” she said. “I prefer to open a space: you’re going to come hear ritual incantation.”
It’s another dimension to Thomas’s compositional voice, one that not only invites contemplation but physically embodies the performance space with musical shapes that shift kaleidoscopically. In …a circle around the sun …, violin and cello harmonies hang in the air like light through a window. The piano frames these sounds with angular figures that search for, but never quite find, resolution. Other of her scores explore greater energy. SCAT for oboe, string trio, and piano unfolds in off-kilter bebop riffs. The music never really settles down.
By focusing on musical motion, shape, and dimension, Thomas’s style has remained remarkably consistent throughout her career. She built her sound world through detailed study of the canon: her music at once bears Bachian energy, William Byrd’s clarity, Ravel’s hazy color, Stravinsky’s gnarly rhythms, a softened sense of Varese’s idiomatic punch, and even jazz, though never in a literal way.
Crafting a personal voice is also something she tries to bring across to her students at the University of Chicago, where she serves as University Professor of Composition, and in the masterclasses she will give to 15 young composers as part of the Divergent Studio today and tomorrow. In preparation for these whirlwind sessions, Thomas pores over scores and meticulously marks them so she can provide helpful comments.
“None of my students sound like me,” she said. “I never talk about my own music in a lesson, ever. I want them to find their own soul, their own beauty, their own creativity. And then I can maybe help them go further in the direction that they want to go in.”
Like her music, Thomas’s teaching is multidimensional. “For one person, I might ask about dynamics being sculpted,” she said. “But then for the next person, I say, ‘keep that in mind in your piece, but in your piece let’s talk about rhythm.’ And then in the next piece let’s talk about counterpoint so that the masterclass adds up for all the people watching.”
By focusing on form, Thomas believes she can unlock musical energy in all its surprise and urgency. Fittingly, this weekend will culminate in her public lecture entitled, “Captured Improvisation–Embodied and Spirited Sound,” which she will give at Longy at 1:30 p.m. Sunday.
From classes to lecture to concert, the weekend, Thomas hopes, will serve as a catalyst for transformation and renewal. “No one composer, musical style, school of thought, technical practice, or historical period can claim a monopoly on music’s truths,” she wrote in her program note for Terpsichore’s Box of Dreams. “Unbreakable is the power of art to build community.”
And Thomas happily plays her part in building deeper musical connections, dancing all the way.