Unsilence with host Phil Kline airs Mondays at 7 pm on New Sounds Radio. Repeats throughout the week, including Wednesdays at 11 am and Sundays at 9 pm.
It’s clear to me that Ann Southam was one of the great composers of our time. She seemed to come out of nowhere, a late starter with no famous teachers, mentors, or even a famous scene to be part of, and evolved from a hobbyist to an assured composer of electronic music, and ultimately the creator of a remarkable body of piano works, most written in formidable series such as Rivers, Glass Houses, and Simple Lines of Enquiry.
Inspired by Riley and Reich, she sounds nothing like them (though one often senses a Riley-like Zen thing there) and as the music moves in modules at the player's discretion, one never gets the sense of a process at work. It all flows, naturally and inexorably, tonal but capable of surprise, as carefully chosen dissonances startle like drops of blood on snow.
The three sets of Rivers were written over three decades and declared finished in 2005. We will hear the entire Second Set, performed by Christina Petrowska Quilico, who worked closely with Southam throughout the writing of the series. Before and after, there will be other piano music that dwells in the twilight between calm and mystery.
Christopher Cerrone’s Hoyt Schermerhorn evokes the nocturnal echo and drip of my favorite-named stop on the C train, while Morton Feldman’s Four Pianos is just my favorite quiet piece of anything, ever. And we will have other inscrutable utterances from Alvin Curran, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Meredith Monk, Erik Satie, and David Lang, all to be heard on this week’s Unsilence.
