Claire Chase in a solo recital at Tanglewood’s Linde Center, May 10, 2025
Most professional musicians play their instruments very well, some brilliantly. Then there are those rare musicians who use their instrument(s) to embody a creative spirit that transcends their instruments’ usual limits. This is partly the result of recent developments in extended playing techniques, as well as in the use of electronics to expand, multiply, and diversify acoustic sound. But in the case of MacArthur Fellow flutist Claire Chase, such tools fuse with a creative energy that embraces a vast expressive range, communicated with a complete physical commitment to each gesture. She resembles the magic beings in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: One moment she can appear as Ariel, a bright spirit of the air; the next she is Caliban, the demonic inhabitant of dark grottos.
While audiences come to concerts expecting to hear a selected menu of scores played as written by (frequently) absent composers, here we were confronted with a totally integrated experience of instrumental and vocal sound, many spontaneously created, as well as lights, body movement, and theater. While five different living composers were listed on the program, every item was shaped by the performer who acted as full creative partner. As co-creator, Chase has been commissioning new works since 2013 through her “Density 2036” project, a 24-year-long reimagining of the solo flute repertory culminating in the centenary of Edgard Varèse’s ground-breaking “Density 21.5.”
Composer Marcos Balter, who will be composition program coordinator at Tanglewood this summer, was on hand to hear and introduce his compositions that framed the program: at the start, a brief “Alone” for solo flute with drone provided electronically by musical wine glasses, and then following intermission, a musical mono-drama, “Pan,” offering seven scenes from the life of that musical demi-god. In between, there was “Sunbird” by 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winner Susie Ibarra, which consisted of Chase’s electronics-enhanced improvised elaborations on a bird call that the composer had used as the basis for her larger orchestral composition, “Sky Islands.” This is a work grounded in an environmental sensibility that is informing much contemporary compositional activity. (Ibarra’s publishing/studio venture “Habitat 1 Sounds” seeks to support Indigenous cultures and environments.)
Also concerned with transcultural practices is Australian composer Liza Lim. To quote the program notes, “Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of her recent work.” Chase included two excerpts from a larger composition, “Sex Magic,” entitled “Throat-song” for alto ocarina and “Moss” for solo contrabass flute. The latter instrument is to the flute what the contrabassoon is to the oboe; its range is about two octaves below the standard instrument, and it produces an awesome fundamental tone (C below the bass staff). In addition, it can readily produce a wide range of multiphonics—that is, the simultaneous sounding of many of its harmonics. “Moss” was inspired by the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer, who describes her subject as humble, almost invisible, but the starting point for the evolution of terrestrial flora.
The final work before intermission was a 10-minute excerpt from Terry Riley’s four-hour-long composition “The Holy Lift-Off.” Riley rose to prominence as a tonal minimalist in the 1960s with his popular, semi-improvised composition “In C” for an ensemble of any size and makeup. Now 90 years old, Riley has collaborated with Chase for the past four years on this score: “The Holy Liftoff has evolved into a multidimensional work that now features an eight-voice chorus of low and high flutes, seven of which are pre-recorded and one of which Chase plays live.” The work begins with a series of hymn-like phrases (Riley called this the “chorale”) which are harmonized by parallel seventh chords on prerecorded tracks, with which Chase coordinated so perfectly that they seemed to all be part of the live performance. It can be added here that while Chase performed everything else on the program from memory, here she used a notated part because (as she explained) parts of the work “had just been written.” Like Riley’s other work, this was a highly accessible, tonally familiar-sounding work using simple yet unique-sounding materials. After the chorale, there were multi-voiced sections using major scale materials sounding a bit like Copland, sections using percussive sounds in a septuple meter reminiscent of Latin American dance music, and sections using rising whole-tone scales, as if Ariel were ascending back to her airy abode. The work was a marvelous amalgam of accessibility, familiarity, and utter originality, and it left me with a desire to hear the hour-long version that Chase has performed with the JACK Quartet.
The major work of the program was Balter’s and Chase’s almost-half-hour long work “Pan.” In his opening remarks, Balter gave credit to Chase as his collaborator, calling her “his sister from another mister.” As Chase was embodying the title character, I realized that her striking outfit was actually a costume: She wore gold-foil-covered high-heel boots with a subtle split-toe effect that suddenly appeared to be goat hooves, as well as a pale green sleeveless jumper which, along with her short-ish hair and excellent lighting effects (thanks to the theater’s tech crew), transformed her into the single protagonist in this monodrama.
Balter outlined the scenario in seven phases, beginning at the end with Pan’s death by execution, and proceeding through six stages of the life-cycle: discovery of music, finding the reeds for the panpipe (actually nymphs he had pursued who transformed themselves to escape—see the story of Mallarmé’s/Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun”), intoxication by his power as a musician, attempts to seduce nature in the forms of the nymph Echo and of the moon, his betrayal by his followers, and his trial. All of this was “narrated” wordlessly through the use of a variety of wind instruments, including panpipes, piccolo, bass and contrabass flutes, and electronically enhanced regular flute (creating echo effects). At one point, Pan the prankster approached the front row of seats, offering the panpipe to several nervous audience members; when one finally reached for it, she mischievously scampered away, hiding in the back of the stage. In the seduction episode, the contrabass flute evoked the voices of the Sirens, the moaning of foghorns, and the sounds of bells; and in the climactic episodes (betrayal and trial), Chase used her voice wordlessly in a terrifying, electronically multiplied rant accompanied by patterned lighting effects spinning at increasingly rapid speeds to produce an overwhelming climax, as full of cathartic power as a Greek tragedy.
To describe this simply as a musical composition is misleading—it is theater, based primarily but not exclusively on sound design and physical performance, offering a new version of the Wagnerian ideal of the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (“total artwork”), fusing sound (color, timbre, dynamics, virtuosity), space, lights, gesture, and metamorphosis of character. And while Chase transformed herself into Pan, she also seemed to discover the character within herself. After occupying the stage alone with her instruments for the entire performance, one left feeling in the company of a large cast of characters and a vast spectrum of orchestral sounds. Her overall performance on Saturday gave eloquent testimony to significant current trends in musical creativity and to the ways musical artists are addressing the concerns of today’s world.
