walking with Viola Torros

May 24, 2021

In September 2020 I came to Auckland, NZ with my partner, who grew up here. Then a few months ago I began playing with the violinist and composer Johnny Chang, who also moved back here after living in Berlin for 11 years.

    Recently Johnny suggested we take a look at some of Catherine Lamb's music. He and Cat played a bunch together while in Germany, and recorded an album of music by the "late Vedic" composer, Viola Torros.

    Here are a few scattered thoughts on the Viola Torros album, which I've been somewhat obsessively listening to. It's a long album: three 40-minute tracks, another half-hour track, and a fifth clocking in at 14 minutes. It's become something of a companion for me on my regular evening walks along the Hauraki Gulf coast, the feature sight of which is Rangitoto Island: a volcano that erupted around 600 years ago.

    A few weeks ago while I was playing violin in the APO I was talking to a friend of Johnny's - a violist in the orchestra. She had heard some of the Viola Torros album and was asking how to find a way into listening to it. At the time we were playing Beethoven's first three symphonies, and I made the comparison that when you listen to Beethoven there is a lot of aural information directing you: insistent rhythmic figures, commanding accents, moments of clear repetition and development. Torros' music (and Cat and Johnny's extrapolations from it), by contrast, asks you, the listener, to take a little more time with it: to guide your own experience of listening, to make observations over a longer time scale, to parse tension, rest, and departure on your own terms.

    As such, listening to the album while walking feels fitting to me, and not just because, as is suggested on Torros' Wandelweiser page: "she intended on the fragments to be installed (performed) across large distances." The music measures the distance of your thoughts, the pleasure of your pace.

    One of the first things I noticed in my initial listening was the tuning. Johnny and Cat's violas move about a pitch space that is very difficult to describe: not adhering to the 12-tone scale, not simply guided by just-intoned intervals, nor by any identifiable lattice structure or alternate scale. The best I can describe it is that they find expressive intervallic synergies that are guided relationally. Their note changes are infrequent enough that they can listen for each others' changes and make deliberate decisions on where to place their next notes, based on this information. They look for some variety in the complexity of an interval's sounding: whether it is thick with beating or more tonally simple. Sometimes they shadow each others' tones so closely that the slightest departure becomes significant. Other times their tones dance around each other, coupled but independent. Even if one voice works slightly more elaborately than the other, there is never a functional hierarchy.

    As far as I can tell, the phrasing of the music comes more from the note choices than from expressive elements of bowing/vibrato. A tone is played and moves on to another; the shaping and articulation of the note or phrase means less than the relation of the tones against each other, in both the horizontal (i.e. melodic) and vertical (i.e. harmonic) dimensions. The varying complexity of the intervals ornately details the musical texture.    

    Aside from the two violas a few other sounds creep in. Some kind of electronic synthesizer, seemingly activated by the viola tones; humming voices intoning held pitches; birds in the background; a truck engine in the background; the sound of passing cars. 

    As with everything on this album it's hard to say what's planned and what's not. It seems safe to say, though, that this looseness is intentional. One of the things that makes it so pleasurable to listen to is that nothing in it pushes towards a predetermined conclusion or arrival point. Like my evening walks - my time for free-form reflection - this music allows for a mindful meandering that restores my own reservoirs of joy.