David Dalle
Thursday May 1st, 2025 with David Dalle
Anna Thorvaldsdottir's "Ubique"; Gwen Laster's New Muse 4tet, Trina Basu & Arun Ramamurthy and more

Today we will hear something truly extraordinary, a new piece by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. This work was commissioned by flautist Claire Chase as part of her Density 2036 project, an ambitious 22 year project she began in 2014 with 22 annual commissions for flute culminating in the 100th anniversary in 2036 of Edgar Varèse's "Density 21.5" for solo flute. This work for flute, piano, two cellos, and electronics, simultaneously sounds inescapably like Thorvaldsdottir's music, but also unlike anything else I've heard from her. Since a lot of Thorvaldsdottir's music is quiet, when I first listened to it, I had the volume up a fair bit. It starts with enormous, incredibly deep bass which made the room shake and took my breath away. Thorvaldsdottir writes: "Ubique lives on the border between enigmatic lyricism and atmospheric distortion. Through a combination of sounds, pitches, and textural nuances, low deep drones envelop lyrical materials and harmonies that breathe in and out of focus throughout the progress of the piece. The flow of the music is primarily guided by continuous expansion and contraction...as it streams with subtle interruptions and frictions but ever moving forward in the overall structure. The work is inspired by the notion of being everywhere at the same time, an enveloping omnipresence, while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle, echoed in various forms of fragmentation and interruption and in the sustain of certain elements of a sound beyond their natural resonance - throughout the piece, sounds are both reduced to their smallest particles and their atmospheric presence expanded towards the infinite." I find "Ubique" works extremely well as a companion piece to John Luther Adams' "An Atlas of Deep Time" we heard a few weeks ago. Together they are music which stretches out infinitely in Time and Space.