Actuate/Resonate by Sam Pluta
Performance notes:
Sam Pluta's piece Actuate/Resonate premiered with the Grossman Ensemble on December 7, 2018.
A number of years ago I heard the JACK Quartet perform Luigi Nono’s remarkable string quartet Fragmente — Stille at the Lucerne Festival. What amazed me about this work was the incredible slowness of it, the quietness of it, how the music seemed to be going nowhere and everywhere at the same time, the blatant orchestration of electronic sounds with acoustic instruments. Last year, we were blessed to hear Craig Taborn perform in the Performance Hall here in the Logan Center. What amazed me about his performance was the incredible slowness of it, the quietness of it, how the music seemed to be going nowhere and everywhere at the same time, the blatant orchestration of electronic sounds with an acoustic instrument. I almost never write quiet music and similarly seldom slow music. Aside from the bookends of this work, I do both. Actuate/Resonate starts with a brief statement of percussive sounds. Then time freezes. For the next 12 minutes we zoom into a single percussive attack to examine its resonances, timbrel changes, gradual unfoldings of colors and harmonies. Suddenly, we continue where we left off in the fifth bar. The ensemble has become a giant analog drum machine. Electronics can’t help but join in on the fun. The piano goes on a rogue mission.