Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Pontifica Universidad Javeriana; Bogotá, Colombia
Anyango Yarbo-Davenport, violin; Leonardo Cáceres, piano

MEDIA

NOTE

Horizon (2021) is a short piece for violin and piano inspired by the work of the Japanese architect and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948).

I first encountered Sugimoto’s work at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris in 2018. Though he has created an extensive, diverse, and multidisciplinary body of work, I was most captivated by his Seascapes (1980—), an ongoing project through which he creates long-exposure photographs of the sea in different locations around the world, always in the same style: a cloudless sky, calm water, and a perfectly even division of the frame between water and air. The horizon is always at the center.

In the years since I encountered these works, I have struggled to explain or fully understand why I am drawn to them so powerfully. The “seascape” can be one of the most banal and uninspired forms of landscape photography, a genre which is itself deeply prone to visual cliché and sentimentalism. Sugimoto’s series contains hundreds of images, many of which are very similar to one another, and none of which incorporate any subject other than the sea or the sky. At first glance, the photographs do not illuminate any unfamiliar aspect of either. Both are presented more or less as they appear to the naked eye, albeit blurred and softened by the photograph’s extremely long exposure times.

The aesthetic intervention in the natural scene is therefore difficult to discern at first. And yet, there is something magnetic and magnificent about these images. They zero in on something, they get right up close to it, and they cut away everything which is extraneous to it. They are focused. There is no question about what the concept is, and what it is not. The frame is clearly and powerfully defined. The rules of the game are clear and because they are clear, we can focus on the game itself. Sugimoto creates a rigorous and at the same time beautiful way of looking at something important, a subject which evokes strong feelings and which connects to our most basic experience as human beings:

We are all standing on the land, looking out at the sea and wondering what lies beneath the surface.

It is a profound artistic challenge to take on a classic “big” subject without irony or critical detachment. New works on the subjects of love, death, heaven, mountain scenery,  the sea,  and so forth are virtually impossible to do well and without cliché. And yet, Sugimoto takes on one such subject directly, in a way which appears simple at first, but which is completely and totally distinct from any other body of landscape photography.

In my own work as a composer, I aspire to a similar level of clarity and simplicity, a clear-sighted focus on what a particular piece contains and what it does not contain, an expressive stillness, and a focus on basic materials of the highest quality. For me, these materials are tones played well, with beautiful sound and clarity of expression, by performers who have carefully cultivated their ability to produce beautiful tone colors.

With each piece I write, I try to trust more fully in the performer, to trust that the aesthetic meaning of our collaborative musical action does not derive solely from the notes on the page, but develops into something full and rich through the act of performance. With each piece I write, I try to trust more that the meaning of the music comes from the way the sound sounds. My role as a composer is modest: to create a clear and well-proportioned structure within which a musician can produce a beautiful tone and can invest that tone with the full measure of their expression and their longing and their desire and their sadness and their joy.

The only modern composer who, in my view, has created a body of musical work as concise, focused, and powerful as the Seascapes is Arvo Pärt. Like Sugimoto, Pärt limits the vocabulary of a work by using materials which are simple and beautiful and common and widely available, presenting them as they are, untransformed, undisguised. In Sugimoto’s case, these are the sea and the sky. In Pärt’s case, they are the scale and the triad. These materials are available to everyone, and neither artist alters them beyond recognition. Instead, they present them to us in a way which is quiet, restrained, modest, and ultimately transcendent. Both artists have inspired me profoundly and I create Horizon with deepest gratitude to them both.

—Scott Ordway, March 2021