Lisa Streich

Miller Theatre commissioned the acclaimed writer and musician Tim Munro to write profiles of the composers featured onstage this season, with the goal of connecting listeners to both the creator and their music.

FALTER

When composer Lisa Streich watches string players perform, she sees more than human beings. “In my mind, the whole string section becomes a flock of winged creatures,” she says. “That has been in my head since the first time I saw an orchestra play.”

FALTER was written at the outset of the pandemic. “For me that time was very beautiful, somehow. I live on an island and life was normal besides the fact that I didn't have to travel. I had my third child and didn't need to take them to concerts.”

“It was very much about having this time to just look at something and noticing things,” she says. It was during the pandemic that Streich first noticed the specific way that butterflies move their wings when they are at rest.

“Be a lepidoptera,” writes Streich at the top of FALTER'S score. The title is the German word for the order of winged insects that includes butterflies and moths. “Not only the beautiful butterflies,’ says Streich, “but also the more ugly moths.”

Wing-choreography is composed into the work. Details of the performer’s right hand—the speed, direction, and pressure of the bow—become an encouragement to capture something of a butterfly’s varied wing movement.

The title, read in English, also hints at the challenges presented by the score. At times, the violinist is asked to move their bow at a dangerously slow speed (60 seconds per bow stroke), to use very high bow pressure, or to bow with the wood of the bow. All result in sounds full of instability and vulnerability.

Never dreamed

Streich grew up in Sweden, near the border with Norway, then later in a rural part of Northern Germany. “There was really nothing to do in both places,” she says. “My parents were not ‘entertainer' parents, and the piano was somehow the most interesting thing to make time pass.”

Streich wore out her family’s classical albums at home, including a compilation of classical hits. Her earliest musical memory was seeing Fiddler on the Roof. “I was so struck by the sound of the violin in the beginning. I listened to it up and down.”

Streich fell in love with the piano, but ultimately a performing instrument wasn’t a good fit. “I don’t like to be on stage,” she says. “I loved playing at home and practicing, but hated concerts.”

“I never dreamed of being a composer,” Streich says. With no female role models, that world felt closed to the young musician. It was only much later, having moved to Berlin, she attended a concert with music by a female composer.

The seed was planted, but Streich was inexperienced. Another pathway presented itself. “It was easier to get into school for church music than for composition,” she says. If she switched her focus to the pipe organ, she could still perform, but never be on stage. And Streich felt that church music could provide a more stable life, as well as another route to her true love, composition.

Calm life-tempo

Much of the music of tonight’s program is performed at tempos significantly slower than a human heart rate. At the end of FALTER, each beat of the bar lasts for six seconds, requiring an extraordinary level of concentration for the performer.

Streich laughs as she recalls people referring to the relaxed “Scandinavian” nature of the tempos in her music. As a young composer, her goal was to find the slowest tempo where a performer could still keep a solid pulse. “My favorite tempo is 37 beats per minute,” she says. “I think it's just such a calm life-tempo. It can be very beautiful to get the pulse down to that speed.”

Book of chords

For Streich, everything begins with chords. “Chords are the essence of expression,” she says. “I try to find the expression of what each piece is about in chords.”

Streich’s search begins with recordings of amateur and professional singers and choirs that she finds the internet. “I look for harmonic moments that are familiar, but which have been given a special or unusual intonation.”

She analyzes and notates these seductive, hazy chords with the use of several pieces of software. “I see myself as a photographer,” she writes, “taking audible pictures, millisecond long moments that are special for me.”

These musical snapshots appear in multiple compositions. Streich has published some of these in Book of Chords, gathering chords under evocative names: “Gloria,” “Prayer,” “God was not a feminist,” "Dark lilac,” “On earth we are briefly gorgeous.”

Streich uses quarter tones (the pitches between the notes on the piano) to capture more of the subtleties in these chords. This extra layer allows her to “come back to the state of seeing the world for the first time. I can have this feeling of being three years old again.”

These chords also extend a long tradition. “Even though there are new chords to be discovered,” she says, “there is always a bridge to the past.” And there is a kind of tragedy in that bridge. “The chord becomes very aware that it is a relic.”

Motorized piano

Streich has consistently felt constrained by traditional musical boundaries. “I have always found it impossible to play a simple major chord normally on a piano.” She has sought to explore hidden musical spaces, to explore a fragility not present on the piano’s surface.

If a human could not play these chords, she thought, then perhaps a machine could. Over several years Streich developed the motorized piano, a mechanical device that transforms the sound of the piano, lending it an otherworldly character.

A long metal rod sits above the strings of the piano. Several motors hang from the rod, rotating slender pieces of paper that delicately brush the piano strings. The speed and direction of the brushing is determined by a device usually controlled by the pianist.

“The motors somehow were a way to explore all the many subtle shades of a major or minor chord.” The brushing excites the resonating strings, while also subtly altering the timbre of the instrument.

SAFRAN

The first work to fully exploit Streich’s new invention was SAFRAN. The title comes from the Swedish word for “saffron,” a very common spice in Swedish baking, especially around Christmastime. For Streich it evokes a powerful sense-memory.

“When I lived abroad and came home, the airport was filled with this smell of saffron. It’s a unique scent, not sweet, not spicy and somehow very multilayered. Strong, but not dominant. It’s a very nostalgic smell to me.”

With SAFRAN, Streich tried to find something of the spice’s unique, ambiguous quality. At first, little in the music is familiar. A disembodied, fragile violin floats above the whirring of the piano’s rotors, which sound like the musical winding up of a clock.

Occasionally, a wisp of memory rises to the surface, but only for a moment. “That is the quality of saffron,” says Streich, “it is in-between somehow.”

Frame of reference

Streich believes that her music isn’t complete until an audience hears it. “The most beautiful moments to achieve,” she says, “are when a listener completes the composition in their very own way.”

Her goal is to leave the music of a composition open enough that they can bring their own selves to the piece. “I don't want to deprive them of anything. Their lives might look very different, and they might have very different imaginations.”

She finds that one-word titles work well. “It's good to somehow open a frame of reference, so people have something to interpret around. One-word titles give a hint, but they don’t dictate either.

The meaning should not be too closed-off. “If you somehow say, ‘this piece is about this’, then people also tend to say, ‘I didn't hear this. I heard something else.’”

ORCHESTRA OF BLACK BUTTERFLIES

Streich loves the orchestra. “There are so many players. I can write really huge chords, and find these expressions that I am in love with.” With this work she wanted to see if she could find full expression of these chords with just four players.

Center-stage sit two concert grand pianos, interlaced, tuned a quarter tone apart, lids removed. Each piano is fitted with one of Stretch’s piano-motor mechanisms, operated from a single fader box in the middle of the ensemble.

Streich sees these pianos as more than inanimate instruments. “They are an orchestra of two black butterflies.” Without their lids, “they have had their wings clipped. It’s very brutal, actually.”

Directly behind the pianos is a percussion setup. Two players command a conventional orchestral setup, including timpani, bass drum, glockenspiel, cymbals, vibraphone. (Quite different from the more varied collection of instruments often found in the music of living composers.)

And there are other elements, echoing other sections of the orchestra: bowed vibraphones (strings), whirly tubes (winds), the players adding their hummed voices to the mix.

Ghostly sounds emerge. A half-remembered melody? Whispers from a night of dancing, long passed? ORCHESTRA OF BLACK BUTTERFLIES uses chords from Streich’s Book of Chords. In her publication, each is named and accompanied by evocative texts:

   Dark lilac:

     Night with stripes of light.
     Dark black, dark lilac, dark blue.

   Medusa:

     Sky underwater
     Divine beneath the horizon unkillable, mortal.

   Petrolio:

     A painting at the gas station
     oil on puddle gasoline on asphalt
     all colors on dark streaks of rainbow

Precarious moments

ORCHESTRA OF BLACK BUTTERFLIES was composed by the Sweden-based Streich for the New York-based ensemble Yarn/Wire. As a result of this distance, musicians and composer were not able to meet in person to develop the new work.

Streich relishes this sense of the unknown. “A very important part of my work is that I don't want to be sure of the outcome—that I have no idea how this piece is going to work.”

“Life is full of so many precarious moments,” she says. “To implement that precariousness on stage, when there is built-in imperfection you can’t escape from—the music somehow becomes more close to life.”

Surprises result from this uncertainty. Near the opening of ORCHESTRA OF BLACK BUTTERFLIES, each percussionist is instructed to sit to the left of a pianist, placing their arm around the pianist to play melodies with their right hand. Streich imagined this moment as a tender, intimate moment of touch at the beginning of an eventful journey.

One of the piano/percussion duos were immediately comfortable—“they knew each other very well, so it really looked harmonious, like an old couple.” The other duo was initially less comfortable, but the result, although different from what Streich imagined, delighted her. “The piece became better as a result.”

Pure existence

Ideas come in strange parcels at odd times. “Like in the supermarket, when I’m not thinking about it,” says Streich, who will have a strong feeling—“of something in life that is so beautiful or so ugly”—and will follow this feeling, “rushing to capture it, to give it to somebody else through my music.”

That search has led to music which, while sometimes complex on the page, pursues its ideas with clarity. “I believe my music is very simple in a way,” she says, “and I think that it has become much more clear over the years. In the end it will communicate something of the essence of what's here in my life at the moment, even if not intended.”

For Streich, music alone can tell the truth. “It can touch you in ways that nothing else can, somehow. It is indescribable—it can express things that you can't say with words, and they become so strong and feel so true.”

She thinks of music of the past. “Two hundred years after this music has been written, I can still feel the truth of this person today. Somehow I can relate, can feel somebody else's existence. Their pure existence.”

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