The Path to Liza Lim's second Composer Portrait

Miller Theatre commissioned writer Lara Pellegrinelli to create the program notes for the Composer Portraits in the 2022-23 season as well as a series of Q&As with Executive Director Melissa Smey. Here is the first installment, centering around our opening Portrait featuring the music of Liza Lim.

Q. As we enter the first full season of in-person programming since the pandemic, can you talk about how Miller Theatre fared during these two challenging years? What was different and what have you learned?

A. The pandemic gave Miller Theatre the opportunity to think about what we do and what really matters. We’ve always supported the development of new work and the people who make that work happen. Looking through the lens of Composer Portraits, that includes not only composers and musicians, but our audiences. Nothing happens without them.

During COVID, these commitments felt more important than ever, but the inability to have live performances made it imperative that we do things differently. So we launched Live from Columbia, an online concert series drawing on all of the different kinds of programming that we’d normally present in person. Because it was digital, it was amazing to see that we reached listeners in all 50 states and in 80 countries across the globe, something that would never be possible in our 688-seat venue on Columbia’s campus in New York City.

We also launched our podcast, Mission: Commission. We'd always talked about taking what I consider the heart of our Composer Portrait concerts, the discussions that happen with composers on our stage, and creating something from it. The pandemic finally gave us the time to develop that idea and produce it. Composition can seem very mysterious. What happens when someone attempts to create something where there was nothing before, especially in light of the challenges around us at this moment? We’re attempting to demystify it. These episodes are also beautiful lessons in optimism and perseverance.

Q. How have the achievements of broadening audiences and deepening our understanding of composers carried over into the new season as we return to live performance experiences in New York City?

A. When we were online during the pandemic, we featured acclaimed composers and musicians who were local to New York and showcased them to a broader audience. We have the inverse in the new season: we’re throwing open the doors to local audiences so they can hear the works of acclaimed international composers, who we’ve missed these last few years. We’ll have Australian composer Liza Lim and Italian composer Luca Francesconi as our first two concerts in the series this fall.

This represents a return to something important about what we do at Miller: providing unique experiences in a crowded cultural landscape. We’re here to add to the richness of the artistic dialogue in New York City.

Q. Liza Lim had a Composer Portrait concert during the 2013-14 season. What made it time for a second Portrait?

A. Her first Composer Portrait, which featured the International Contemporary Ensemble, was almost ten years ago now. And it included U.S. premieres of works that had been written ten years earlier. Even though Liza was an acclaimed international composer, writing for some of the most prominent institutions and ensembles the world over, her work wasn’t very well known in the U.S. This concert feels similar in that we’re presenting the premiere of a joint commission for the JACK Quartet alongside a solo cello work she wrote six years ago. We’re providing another opportunity for New York audiences to hear her music, to give it a platform, for it to be documented, and to be recognized.

One of the benefits of bringing ensembles and composers together for a multi-day residency in our space around the Composer Portrait concerts is that it affords us an opportunity to get to know each other. When it goes well, I always hope that it won't just be one and done. Liza and I had stayed in touch because she’s somebody who I knew that I wanted to work with again. So when she reached out last October because there was a potential commission for the JACK Quartet from the Lucerne Festival and asked if Miller might be a co-commissioner, it was an instant yes. Liza and JACK had long been interested in working together. And I'm always interested in working with them.

Q. Tell us about her music.

A. With Liza (pronounced Lee-za), who she is as a person, a sense of place that comes from being rooted in Australia, and her feelings of social responsibility towards our planet, inform her practice. The music feels organic, which is not to say that it isn’t technical. She exercises very precise control. There’s beautiful orchestration, masterful use of timbre, and a sense of form that's created from the content itself, like unwrapping a beautiful gift. It's appealing to look at and then continues to reveal more in an exciting way.

I want to add that her musical influences are synthesized so beautifully that the components are not immediately identifiable. You can't say that one section comes from an Indigenous Australian influence and another is Chinese; Lim’s parents immigrated to Australia from China and she spent part of her childhood in Brunei. She's someone who has absorbed the sounds of different places and people.

Q. In 2014, critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote that “Lim exemplifies a younger generation of composers who have revivified modernism by kicking away its technocratic façade and heightening its visceral power.” Perhaps that’s true, but, more specifically, I hear Lim’s music as visceral because it is embodied; it lives in the physicality of its performers and our relationships to our physical selves. Would you agree?

A. Yes, you’re exactly right. She is drawing on a lineage that includes composers like Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen. The music has an underpinning of European high modernism in its vocabulary, but, what's interesting to me, is that she’s using that language to do something different. There's a muscularity to it, but not for its own sake. It's not like the music of Charles Wuorinen or Elliott Carter, where inscrutability might be considered a virtue. Her music is rigorous, and, at the same time, there's something very inviting about it.

Q. What can you share about her new work commissioned for JACK? And about the solo piece on the program that will be played by JACK’s cellist Jay Campbell?

A. I haven’t heard it yet, but the new piece is titled String Creatures. In Liza’s composer’s note, she says that she was thinking of the quartet as a hybrid organism, playing on the magical, animated qualities of string. One of the movements is called “Cat’s Cradle.”

The solo work is an ocean beyond earth (2016). It is written for cello, but a cello that is prepared with a violin and thread. Meaning this: the cellist will be seated in a chair with a violin on a stand a few feet in front of him, a piece of thread woven through the strings. The cellist uses the thread to play both instruments. It's subtle—and gorgeous.

Q. What is Liza Lim like as a person?

A. She's serious, very serious, and also warm and open. When we talked over Zoom in the spring, she was working on an orchestral piece at the same time as the piece for JACK. And she showed me that literally every wall in her studio was covered in score paper that she had taped there so she could visualize the form of whole piece. And I just thought, Wow.