For Composer Lei Liang, Technology Brings a Different Transcendence - New York Times

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Lei Liang, who has a coming Composer Portrait concert devoted to his work at the Miller Theater. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

On Sunday afternoon, the composer Lei Liang looked on silently as the ensemble Loadbang made its second pass through his “Lakescape V.” For seven years a commission from the busy Mr. Liang had been on a wish list kept by the group, an unusual quartet consisting of trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet and baritone voice. It became a fixed point on the calendar nearly three years ago, when a concert of Mr. Liang’s music was scheduled for Thursday, part of the Miller Theater’s Composer Portrait series.

But the musicians received their parts only several weeks ago and the coaching by the composer gave them just five days to close the distance between written page and performance.

“That’s right!” Mr. Liang exclaimed after clarifying the articulation of the opening, an effect like the passing of granular hail through funnel clouds. “This time I can hear the particles swirling around.”

Sounds that have long occupied the imagination must eventually make the leap to flesh and bone, wood and brass. The materials of “Lakescape V,” a departure from its more tranquil “Lakescape” series forerunners, have had an even greater distance across which to spring. They are a conceptual shift from earlier Liang works, including some selected for his Portrait concert: “Serashi Fragments” (2005), a string quartet inspired by a Mongolian chaorer (two-stringed fiddle); “Ascension” (2008), a rollicking brass quintet with percussion; and “Luminous” (2014), a concerto for the dexterous contrabass player Mark Dresser recently released on New World Records.

In the past, Mr. Liang’s works often focused on storytelling, frequently reconstructing memories of his native China. The saxophone concerto “Xiaoxiang,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, was inspired by the tale of a villager whose husband was killed by a Communist official during the Cultural Revolution.

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This emphasis on storytelling hasn’t changed in “Lakescape V.” But the technology that Mr. Liang encountered during a three-year residency from 2013-16 at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology’s Qualcomm Institute fundamentally shifted his perception of space.

“Think of it like a bird that can fly into a painting, like the animated perspective of a drone,” he explained in an interview, describing his new style. “You can look at something very closely — or pull away. You can create swift transitions between what you choose to see.”

For “Hearing Landscapes” (2015), Mr. Liang worked alongside a team of Qualcomm Institute engineers whose robotic imager scanned paintings by the Chinese artist Huang Binhong (1865-1955), a master at creating the illusion of depth. Extremely high-resolution scans — more than four billion pixels, enough to fill 2,000 HD televisions at native resolution — give viewers the sense of penetrating two-dimensional surfaces and being immersed in the painting, as in virtual reality.

“I felt like I was standing on a mountain,” Mr. Liang said of the first time he saw one of the paintings projected at the institute.

Using multichannel speakers, “Hearing Landscapes” tried to transform this visual experience into an aural one. Mr. Liang continues to explore the kind of multiple, shifting perspectives that evoke the scanner’s joystick navigation, as in a coming commission for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

Listening to Loadbang’s rehearsal of “Lakescape V,” delicate multiphonic notes built up layers of pitches. Duos shimmered over musical drones. A section called “Composing the wind” explored air sounds, altering a listener’s sense of the space around the instruments, tracing their serpentine tubing. Then the showers of particles returned: deconstructed syllables from a poem in Mandarin by Wai-Lim Yip.

“‘Fei’ is the word for ‘fly,’” Mr. Liang explained to the musicians. “‘Out of darkness we fly.’ There’s a leap. It’s transcendent.”

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