Tempo Reviews Meadow

​Linda Catlin Smith – Linda Catlin Smith, Meadow. Cooper, Roewer, Butt. Louth Contemporary Music Society, LCMS2021

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2021

Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/tempo/article/linda-catlin-smith-linda-catlin-smith-meadow-cooper-roewer-butt-louth-contemporary-music-society-lcms2021/55A4C41B83203CF7E83A1612FD1DB17F/share/a7db10d59bf96b4c62e3c1f20a2fa22f83497aea

I first sat with Meadow while bird-watching out of my parents’ back window in suburban New York state. Over the string trio’s 30 minutes, it grew around me and, not quite unnoticeably, filled the space, in a way neither immersive nor ambient. It became the walls, the furniture, my mother’s decorative plates, the hung posters; it moved through the window, becoming the trees, the birds. In a pandemic that has had me feeling glued to the familiar rooms and the walls of my life, the music – and the performance of Mia Cooper, Joachim Roewer and William Butt – made me want to get closer to it, to see and hear it played. I began, in a moment of self-indulgence, to imagine the ideal venue to hear this music live, were that possible. I imagined a small grey barn, maybe in Marin County, California, sunlight beaming in, illuminating the dusty air, as the string trio plays to an audience of 10–15. This is the first music ever to inspire interior design in me.

What has Linda Catlin Smith done here with Meadow? Described basically, it is a slow-moving, chordal, warm, full-timbred, half-an-hour-long string trio. It neither gains nor loses momentum. I struggled to make a mental moment-to-moment map of the piece because each moment only invokes the aggregate. Silences are interspersed throughout like movement breaks, and are what movement breaks should be: breaths that can or cannot take formal significance. There is a melancholy about it, but a wide-ranging one: in my parents’ back room I experienced the parlour melancholy of Erik Satie, but in subsequent listens I was able to zoom in and feel the ambient, fuzzed, noise melancholy of Éliane Radigue or Bonnie Jones. This is really more of a shade than a mood, because it does not weigh one down. I have probably listened to this piece 20 times.

There is a lot of motive and harmony in here. It is a masterclass in harmony that is in some space between functional and non-functional. Each harmony is pleasant, but it does not drift. It moves forward and does not cadence. It does not rest and is not suspenseful. I have time to hear what I want and I have many things to choose from. I thought of Jürg Frey two times during the piece: first, that it uses motive and harmony to a strangely similar sort of event-density as Frey’s II. Streichquartett; second, that Catlin Smith’s quasi-tonal harmonies never tip and become treacly as Frey’s sometimes do.

Motives appear but rarely, if ever, metamorphose into melodies. Any sparkling of a motive or melody is immediately joined, flanked by the other two instruments. Not in a ‘held me back, dragged me down, impeded’ way. The harmony instruments immediately ballast the motivic one; they ‘give stability to (a ship) by putting a heavy substance in its bilge’; they ‘form (the bed of a railroad line or road) with gravel or coarse stone’ (the Apple dictionary doing better to describe this than I could). But they do all of this in a swift breath. The piece leans towards melodic sectionality; it moves into a motivic and harmonic world and sits and rests, and the foliage, little by little, glows hotter around, until it breathes deeply, rises and continues.

The performance of Cooper, Roewer and Butt is essential to highlighting and preserving what I have described above. Each instrument sounds perfect for its momentary role as motive or accompaniment, Butt’s cello adding just the right touch of Saint-Saëns to his melodic portion around nine minutes in. At 21:00, the trio bubbles up into a textural syncope, playing with such minute mimicry and timbral unity that it sounds like a multi-tracked recorder or bass flute. At 24:00, they are back to a fuller timbre, rocking back and forth, absolutely heaving. I hope this is as fun to play as it is to imagine what it’s like to play. The final six to eight minutes do get a touch nostalgic, going a bit hard on the ‘echo of what’s come before’ effect. I didn’t really notice this until my twentieth time listening, though, and by the last couple minutes the trio is simply exhaling, as they deserve.

The CD is attractively packaged, with Alice Maher’s cover photo providing a vibe that only just hints at Midsommar. I am somewhat confused as to why the case lists the runtime at 30:00 when it is actually 32:25; surely, it’s preferable to say nothing? In Catlin Smith’s liner note, she goes for the meadow metaphor, ascribing features of the piece to those of a meadow and the feeling of being in a meadow. I do not like this very much or think it is adequate; the piece deserves better than the implication of text-painting. I do buy into her description of what she herself gets out of the work:

I like to sit with things for a while, to dwell in the material, to have a chance to listen – whatever the aural equivalent word would be for ‘gazing’… These things all combine to take the music into what I think of as subtle emotions – shadings of emotion, perhaps; I often say music can touch on emotions we don’t really have names for.

After one of my listens, the streaming service auto-played some of Catlin Smith’s piano music. I think Meadow strikes me so much in part because her style is really suited to this ensemble; the strings can bend and swerve with the bells and ambience. The piano provides the bells and ambience in a way more akin to other music I recognise. Writing for strings, she is in a world of her own. I think this is why I kept coming back to Meadow. It’s what mid-century Americana string-quartet writers would have written had they developed this imagination for form. It’s how 1970s spectralists would have realised their experiments in blurring harmony and timbre had they developed this imagination for genre. Meadow contains not a single gimmick, trick, conceit or ‘A ha’; it is music that never encourages you to do anything other than continue listening to it, and I did, over and over. It is my favourite release of 2020, and I may not have adequately fulfilled the descriptive function of a review, but I will fulfil the teaser function: run, don’t walk and go and listen to this for yourself. You really must.

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​https://open.spotify.com/track/6vYBdfh4upqn1qufkkaoUO?si=e0a8dc70575c42d7