What comes before
for alto flute, cello, and piano
commissioned by Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
About
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble premiered What comes before in Berkeley and San Francisco on March 2 and 3, 2024. Recording coming soon.
When Matilda Hofman invited me to write for Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s tribute concert to Kaija Saariaho, I was in equal parts delighted and terrified to be on the same program. Saariaho’s control of color and texture is astonishing, especially when writing for her favorite instruments, alto flute and cello. It has been a joy to study Saariaho’s works, in particular Sept Papillons and Couleurs du vent. During my time with these pieces I felt inspired to create a new work using Saariaho’s vocabulary, in an attempt to broaden my own vocabulary. I took a cue from remix culture and created a collage of sounds from Sept Papillons and Couleurs du vent as a companion to my own piano writing and also improvised piano parts using Sept Papillons as a guide. The title What comes before is therefore both a reference to the wondrous, ecstatic burden of existing literature as a new music composer, and a literal description of the flute and cello parts, which I chopped and reassembled from Saariaho. One might consider What comes before a turntablist impression of Saariaho’s music.
Review
Jeff Rosenfeld reviewed our concert in the San Francisco Classical Voice.
Chew’s piece, What comes before, featured Fong, Pelinka on alto flute, and Allegra Chapman on piano. It’s a remix of fragments from Saariaho’s music, though Chew goes several levels beyond quotation in honoring the late composer. The piece makes something original out of instruments Saariaho favored and with equal variety, not just in its application of techniques but in the time-honored structure of providing cadenza-like roles and pairings for the instruments.
If anything, What comes before makes more of the performer-as-personality than Saariaho does. Chew invites us to toss Saariaho over and over in our minds, just as generations of composers will have to process her influence. And the performers clearly had the full measure of Chew’s compositional game.