Essay by Donna Lee Davidson
“Tonight’s program spans film without soundtrack, architecture inspired by Béla Bartók, poetry inspired by paintings and the words of painters, prose inspired by nature, and an entire catalog of Renaissance-era paintings.”
It’s all about perspective. Or perception, some might say. For pianist and composer Anthony Cheung (b. 1982, San Francisco), it’s perspective—in a painting, in camera angles, in architectural blueprints, in poetry. In one plain word, ekphrasis, the process of evoking, interpreting, describing, or maybe even prescribing an artwork through another medium. Tonight’s program spans film without soundtrack, architecture inspired by Béla Bartók, poetry inspired by paintings and the words of painters, prose inspired by nature, and an entire catalog of Renaissance-era paintings. Cheung’s perspective is stacked on top of one artwork already interpreted by another. All of it put together hints at something larger, at how multiple perspectives can come together in one space and be held at the same time.
Zoom in and you’ll see the brush strokes, the rhyme and meter, the metal and concrete. Zoom out and you’ll see the best description of Cheung... as an artist first, before being a composer and pianist. The trees are the music we’ll hear tonight; the forest is flush with an ecosystem of artistic expression. Don’t miss the forest for the trees. If you know painting, draw from that. If architecture, build on it. If film, hit record. If poetry—if words—write it down. Whatever you do, or have, bring it with you. You’re in the forest tonight, you’ll need camping gear. And a flashlight.
“I’m often drawn to metaphors. Mostly metaphors from other artistic disciplines because music is already so intangible,” Cheung said in an interview over Zoom. “If we can draw out connections with the other senses, we can have more cross-sensory metaphors.”
To borrow from his own playbook: Cheung is the artist tasked with creating the perspective of a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional flat surface. Our task, as an audience, will be perception—to, see, hear, or become aware of the third dimension through our senses, “the tactility of how we literally feel like we can touch the object in our mind,” Cheung added.
Twice Removed (2024) is “responses to artworks that are already responses, hence the ‘twice removed.’ There’s a kind of slipperiness that I’m interested in,” Cheung said about this piece. The first movement, “Stretto House,” is based on the masterpiece of a structure designed by famed architect Steven Holl, whose blueprint was based on Béla Bartók’s use of stretto in Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. What’s slippery beyond the process of ekphrasis is how Cheung wanted to respond to Stretto House without being crowded by his vast knowledge of and influence by Bartók.
“How naïve did I want to be when alluding to the original source material to try and get at the response?” Cheung asked about his creative process. “I can’t help but be thinking about Bartók, you know, when I’m writing this, because Bartók was a composer. He was working directly in my medium and, of course, his string quartets are so influential. I know them well.” Cheung was intentional to morph the physical structure back into sound, not mimic the sound already in the physical structure. But he acknowledges that Bartók, nonetheless, is “sort of an unconscious influence.”
The musical term ‘stretto’ is a melody overlapping itself, building tension. For Holl, the architectural tension of concrete and metal. Cheung used the analyses of Holl’s material and structure to consider his approach, the concrete blocks inspired by percussion and the curves of the metal roof—the stretto of the house inspired by strings. “There are moments in the movement when you come to these huge, granitic chords, almost like blocks of sounds.” Between those blocks reside “streams of sound that are in constant motion, tracing the arches with the upper limits of the melodies themselves.”
We’ve built our structure, our tents. Let’s grab our flashlights and gather around the campfire.
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“830 Fireplace Road” is written after John Yau’s 14-line poem scattering the statement made by painter and drip-technique pioneer Jackson Pollock: “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing,” Pollock said at an exhibition while showing the painting Number 27. Yau re-orders this statement in line 2: When aware of what I am in my painting, I’m not aware and continues through line 14: When painting, I’m not doing. I am in my doing. I am painting.
“The poem starts out with meaning,” Cheung said. “I understand the words, what they’re doing, what they’re saying.” But eventually, “the words start to lose inherent meaning and just becomes rhythm. And you just kind of submit to the rhythm of the words and the kind of spell that it casts over you, the sonic properties of poetic delivery I find very interesting.”
“I want to tap into his tapping into the spirit of Jackson Pollock. This is the one movement where I take the rhythm of the words and try to translate them into the gestures,” as though transcribing a heightened reading of the poem, “capturing the physicality of the language.”
Drip technique results in a canvas elaborately splashed with paint, no brushstrokes to tame the splatter. They look whimsical and unintended—maybe even silly to those who wonder why abstract art holds so much value. But the mechanisms for attaching ropes to buckets of paint to drip onto a canvas, or splashing it by hand, is entirely intentional, and tedious, and laborious. “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting,” Pollock also said about his process.
There is a layering here of the literal and the metaphorical. Pollock becomes a part of the painting, emerging his entire body in the process. He is not aware of it by the literal fact that he’s walking around the canvas on the floor, splashing paint from every angle. There is no way to see what the painting is doing, or becoming, before lifting it up to gain that perspective. All Pollock can do is perceive the painting through the bodily gestures that submerge him in the process.
Are we perceiving yet?
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“Both the painter and the poet always begin with the line,” the poet Dean Radar said in an interview with Brooklyn Poets. “A line in a painting and a line in a poem—how that word, that concept, is really at the basis of both modes of art. “Meditation on Motion” is named after a poem by Radar responding to Cold Stream, a painting by Cy Twombly (who was often compared to Pollock). The painting reminds Cheung of “Chinese calligraphy masters who would write a poem with just one continuous stroke without ever lifting their brush.”
“The line like the river does not know to stop/neither does my wonder,” Radar’s poem begins.
Let’s go engage our own wonder. It’s time for our hike.
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“Journey to Mount Tamalpais” is a prose poem interspersed with black and white drawings by painter, poet, and philosopher Etel Adnan. “Are the paintings responsive to the mountain itself? Are they in tandem with the words? Are they responses to the words? Are the words responses to the mountain or are they responses to her paintings?” Cheung continued.
That interactive questioning—the slipperiness Cheung is interested in—appears in this movement. The persistent sliding throughout the piece demonstrates it, shifting in timbre and color alongside meanings and interpretations. “She’s tapping into a sonic metaphor that is cross-sensory and cross-medium,” Cheung said about Adnan.
Notes move only incrementally, microtonally, slowly. Leading into this movement, the stretto, slides, rhythmic repetitions, and motions quickly ripped by and across wide ranges too fast to be perceived by the ear, only the body. For a mount as mighty as Tamalpais these are softened, but heavier and magnified, perceived by the ear as well as the body. There’s a sense of holding in a small space, standing still, while beholding something grander in the more sustained resonances that remain throughout.
“In this, I was just trying to glean [an] overall sense of wonder and the majesty of this mountain, and her kind of spiritual connection with it. I was as moved by the natural beauty of that mountain as I was her depiction of it. It’s particularly meaningful to me because I’m from San Francisco and I used to hike on Mt. Tam,” Cheung said.
“She says ‘painters have a knowledge which goes beyond words. They are where musicians are when someone blows the saxophone, the sky is made of copper.’”
As the sun sets, the sky streaks a fire orange, yellow, and red. The clouds receding into the dark are lined silver with the last rays of sun, the stragglers who won’t tuck themselves away. We’ve settled back onto our campground for the night and are gathered around the campfire, some sitting on blankets, others in beach chairs. It’s time to pull out our instruments and play into the night—jam.
The Real Book of Fake Tunes (2015) is written as a five-movement suite. It can be likened to the early Baroque five-movement dance suites or the jazz suites written for distinct instrumentations with blended styles of jazz (bossa nova, swing, bebop, blues, samba)—including fusions with other genres, like classical music. This piece embodies both, genres infused.
“To the extent that jazz can be considered popular music, which it can’t really be, that was my parallel path as a musician coming up—studying that and being very, very into listening and interpreting, and then kind of finding ways that I might connect them into my more score-based, notated work,” Cheung said about his background in jazz.
The improvisatory-sounding opening settles into a groove that could easily be a rhythm section for a be-bop tune infused with funk. Cheung sticks the quartet with hits on syncopated beats before they hit a chord. That pattern loosely vamps while instruments flicker tiny embellishments in the residue of the breaks in unison sound, a showy feature of individual chops in jazz tunes. As if trading fours, a jazz and funk form where each instrument takes a solo for a four-beat vamp while the rest of the instruments get out of the way. When it reoccurs in the last movement, it’s in a form even more recognizable, because you might loosely recognize the chord progression, and the same freneticism, in jazz saxophonist John Coltrane’s Countdown.
“Some are rather playful, and the first movement and the last movement are kind of hard and driving, more groovy, and then others are more lyrical and contemplative. I wanted a kind of range…a huge range of contrasts between these movements.”
It’s been an eventful yet tiring day. It’s time to turn into our tents for the night. In the morning, we’ll get back out into the forest where all of our senses will collide.
Tactile Values (2023) is Cheung’s own process of ekphrasis, looking at artworks as a first interpretation rather than a response to one, no longer twice removed—where our perception of the trees intersects with Cheung’s perspective of the forest.
Cheung is responding to two works, one a catalogue of Renaissance-era paintings put together by art historian Bernard Berenson, and the other a 1967 experimental short film, Fuses, made by painter Carolee Schneemann.
“I often like to provide program notes that are just quotations from other people who have a kind of window into the possibilities of the piece. It’s less committal than me trying to dictate what you need to listen for,” Cheung remarked. “I am trying to take some of these ideas from [Schneemann] and Berenson. Just kind of keep them in your mind while listening to this piece,” Cheung instructed.
From his 1896 essay, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, leads out with Cheung’s first chosen quote. “Painting is an art which aims at giving an abiding impression of artistic reality with only two dimensions. The painter must, therefore, do consciously what we all do unconsciously—construct his third dimension. And he can accomplish his task only as we accomplish ours, by giving tactile values to retinal impressions.”
Berenson was positing the idea that even in reality, it’s not sight alone that perceives depth and solidity. Sight only gives a two-dimensional retinal impression. It’s through touch, muscle movement, and muscular sensations in our development as infants that our unconscious minds construct this third dimension.
“The tunings [are] in a constant state of flux. Sometimes the microtones are beating against the equal temperament of the piano, or of the percussion, and you get this sense of—literally this bodily sense. There’s kind of equating microtonal beating with some kind of bodily response,” Cheung said about exacting this cross-sensory experience across mediums. “There’s a feeling of blurriness, almost like multidimensions that happens when these tunings interact with each other.”
Rather than using percussion for the obvious tactility of striking instruments with pointed articulations, Cheung employs it for timbre and texture instead. Vibraphone, multiple gongs, glockenspiel, chimes, cymbals—side-by-side, all textures of the same sounds when you put them together to produce a rounded smoothness.
“There was this humanist turn in painting during the Renaissance, this more direct representation of human feeling and of the human body,” Cheung explained. “For a long time, what was painted was more iconography or symbolic. We have to make a further leap from the real to the represented.”
Schneemann’s experimental erotic film is exactly what the Renaissance era slowly ushered in: a “more direct representation of human feeling and… body,” says Cheung. Schneemann believed that “paint is the power of extending whatever you see or feel, of intensifying it, of reshaping it.”
Schneemann’s film doesn’t focus on the act of lovemaking itself, but the bodily sensations, the tactility and movement it evokes. “I wanted the bodies to be turning into tactile sensations of flickers. And…you get lost in the frame – to move the body in and out of its own frame, to move the eye in and out of the body so it could see everything it wanted to, but would also be in a state of dissolution, optically, resembling some aspect of the erotic sensation in the body which is not a literal translation.”
The last sentence of Schneeman’s quote is what she and Cheung are ultimately achieving: a “painterly, tactile translation edited as a music of frames.”
Experience the captivating music of Anthony Cheung, whose work reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and shifting transformations of tuning and timbre. An all-star lineup—flutist Claire Chase, Yarn/Wire, and the JACK Quartet—join the composer for a dynamic program of recent works.
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