Tyshawn Sorey’s luminous new work is premiered in New York — review

Sound moves through space, and exists in time, so one way to think about music is as an intentional articulation of time. Usually, that’s done with a beat or rhythm. There are traditions, though, that use music as a way to experience a stillness outside of the clock. Medieval music does this, as did the great 20th-century composer Morton Feldman.

One of Feldman’s most famous pieces is Rothko Chapel, commissioned to celebrate the opening of the (non-denominational) chapel in Houston, based around murals by Mark Rothko. A rare composer to follow Feldman’s path is Tyshawn Sorey. As one of the finest drummers in jazz, he is phenomenal at laying out complex rhythms, but as a composer he explores proportions of activity and silence, of music that has no specific direction or even forward motion. Those are some of the qualities of his absorbing, luminous new work, Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), which premiered at the Park Avenue Armory, opening a run of performances.

Monochromatic Light was commissioned to honour the 50th anniversary of the Rothko chapel. The new work uses the nearly same instrumentation as Feldman’s piece — viola, celesta (with piano), percussion and choir. One significant change that makes this work Sorey’s own is that the solo soprano is now a bass-baritone, sung by Davóne Tines.

This is much more than a concert piece. Staged by Peter Sellars, it brings together visual art and dance. In the Armory’s massive drill hall, the audience sat in the round and was in turn surrounded by a parapet. On this were the dancers and giant screens with projected images of abstract painting by Julie Mehretu. Lighting, designed by James F Ingalls, slowly shifted from one color to the next.

With patience and delicacy, Sorey has secular concerns. He gives prominent solo stretches to the viola and piano, played beautifully by Kim Kashkashian and Sarah Rothenberg, and to the drama of Tines’s resonant voice, stretching and swooping to slowly articulate the first line of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”. The end of the piece was Kashkashian playing that theme, and one could hear the score as a 90-minute assemblage of that spiritual.

With so many fascinating components, the performance was easy to admire but hard to feel. It seemed like the right music in the wrong space, the hall too big and the production too grand for something that almost wanted to whisper in the ear, where it might send both warmth and a chill up the spine.

Best of all in this space was the dance, choreographed by Regg Roc Gray in the Brooklyn street style known as flexn, full of graceful and powerful gliding and twisting. Keyed to nearly every change in the music, from dramatic to minute, the dancers responded like leaves in the winds of Sorey’s score and were mesmerising. The pairing of black street styles with high modernist music was one that every classical music institution should note.

★★★★☆

To October 8, armoryonpark.org