Violinist Jennifer Koh sometimes closes her eyes while performing,
depending on what she’s playing. But she doesn’t “see” the music in the
darkness behind her eyelids.
This week, her sound will have a visual incarnation as she performs
with a video by filmmaker Tal Rosner. Koh, an Oberlin College
Conservatory of Music alumna (class of ’97) who’s gone on to an
international career as a soloist and recitalist, commissioned Rosner
to create the video to accompany her performance of former Los Angeles
Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen’s solo for violin, Lachen
Verlernt. She’s debuting it this week at her alma mater.
Koh met Salonen in 2002 and was immediately taken with his music. “I
believe the music written today creates a kind of thread to the past
and reflects a whole range of who we’ve become as human beings —
the ugliest sides of us as well as the most beautiful sides,” she says.
“It helps us experience that when we are together.”
She says Lachen Verlernt (“forgotten laughter”) is based on a song
from Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, about a
narrator begging a clown to teach her how to laugh again. “In a larger
metaphorical sense,” she says, “it’s about reconnecting with emotions
people forgot that they had.”
After discussing the idea with Salonen, she searched for a video
collaborator, “trolling YouTube, looking at a lot of techno videos.”
Eventually she found Rosner, whose work she not only appreciated, but
who also had experience with classical music performances.
The Schoenberg song had a story, but stripped of its words and
recast by Salonen, it is completely abstract. And that’s how Rosner
deals with it.
“I am very interested in abstraction,” he says. “It is difficult to
approach a piece of music in visual terms. You don’t want to impose too
much of a narrative. There is something maybe personal about how I do
it. It is not about giving something finite that says this is the way
to see the piece.”
He found inspiration in looking at power lines criss-crossing the
blue Los Angeles sky. “They create these amazing compositions,
junctions, and layers,” he says. “There is something about the lines
that is evocative of strings and the movement of a bow and string.”
Koh and Rosner both see parallels between how video and dance
interact with music. They move with the music’s rhythm, but unlike a
music video, Rosner’s is not meant to be the visual representation of
the piece. For both, artistic expression is about connecting with
people, and any response is valid.
Koh sees it that way for contemporary music like the Salonen piece,
as well as works like Bach’s famous sonatas and partitas, two of which
bookend her Oberlin recital. “New music is a thread to the past,” she
says. “Every day that passes we’re farther from Bach’s time, 325 years
ago. I still find that music to be incredibly profound. We are always
in conversation with what has come before. It is about creating a tie
to the past, and in a way it shows us a glimpse of the future.”
Jennifer Koh
8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29
Finney Chapel
90 N. Professor St, Oberlin
440.775.8169
Tickets: $10-$28
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2009.