Invisible Hands (2018)

for electric viola and chamber orchestra
duration: 15'

Commissioned by The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Dirk Brossé, Music Director

World premiere:
April 1 & 2, 2018 at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Philadelphia, PA

Program Notes

With a catalog of more than 80 compositions to her credit, along with a busy career as electro-acoustic violist, teacher, recording artist, founder and artistic director of the Scorchio Quartet, and recipient of awards from ASCAP, Meet the Composer, and Arts International as well as fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH, Martha Mooke defies facile characterization. She might perhaps be best described as a genre-bender, though she has also been justifiably called "Mooke the Maverick."

The origin of the work is characteristic of her insatiable curiosity and her openness to ideas from all sources. Invisible Hands was inspired, the composer recounts, by a conversation reported in The Power of Myth that was originally part of a 1988 PBS series. Responding to the journalist Bill Moyers's question whether he ever had the sense of being helped by hidden hands, the celebrated mythologist Joseph Campbell asseverated that this was something that happened to him all the time. He added that, if you "follow your bliss" and live the life you ought to be living, you would begin to meet people of similar inclinations who would open doors for you in previously unsuspected places.

The sense of mysticism that illuminated Campbell's thinking plays an important role also in much of Mooke's music, which can be easily explored by way of YouTube and a number of CD and DVD recordings, where luxuriantly saturated textures and a warmly rhapsodic treatment of dissonance sit in easy companionship with exploratory zest, rhythmic vitality, and often sheer good fun. The overall impression, while fearless and even experimental in its individuality, is of an art that remains always blessedly approachable for the listener, serving as a welcome corrective to the arid and by now generally discredited notion that "serious" and "original" must necessarily imply "ugly" and "rebarbative."

Ms. Mooke explains that "What makes Invisible Hands unique is its unusual compositional concept. Conceived as two compositions in one, the first is for traditional chamber orchestra (albeit with timpani at times prepared with inverted cymbal or Tibetan bowl, and nontraditional percussive techniques for string players) and elements of improvisation. The second version adds the electric viola soloist with live electronics processing plus expanded improvisation, for both soloist and orchestra.

"This creates a multidimensional performance experience, giving the audience the opportunity of experiencing the same work twice in vastly different contexts... . No two performances" furthermore, "will be performed or perceived in the same exact way. Each one will be a uniquely shared, yet personal, experience... .

"In the version with electric viola, the 'invisible' factor takes on another dimension with the incorporation of electronics that seem to add sound where no sound was perceived to be made! [rather like the previously unsuspected doors in Campbell's formulation – B.J.] ... Musically, the 'invisible hands' are unseen forces beyond the printed page that help guide the musicians in the musical journey."

Bernard Jacobson

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