The Arts

Anyone who wants to hear how time can move at multiple speeds simultaneously — fast, slow, moderate, frantic — should drop in on Seattle Modern Orchestra's Friday concert, "Layers of Time."

The program, says SMO co-director Jeremy Jolley, features three works from the 1980s that concern "continual change over time." Within that idea, Jolley adds, the three composers find extraordinary variety. Certainly the pieces — Steve Reich's "Eight Lines," Conlon Nancarrow's "Piece No. 2 for Small Orchestra," Gérard Grisey's "Talea" — sound nothing alike.

SMO, now in its second season, is dedicated to playing modern and contemporary works that don't normally get an outing in Seattle, and "Layers of Time" is its latest offering. Jolley and SMO's other co-director, conductor Julia Tai, couldn't be more pleased with how their new ensemble is doing.

"The first season went really well," says Tai. "We had three concerts and we have a consistent following of audience." Attendance has ranged from 150 to more than 200 listeners — a good showing for a newcomer to Seattle's classical-music scene. SMO also got a grant from the Washington State Art Commission for its 2011-2012 season. "Very encouraging," Jolley says, "given how new we are."

As it did last season, SMO will perform in multiple venues.

"There's a great advantage to not necessarily having a home," Jolley says, "because you can match the venue with the program."

At the Good Shepherd Center's Chapel Performance Space, for instance, there's no fixed seating. So it's possible to have the audience surrounded by the orchestra, as some scores require.

In Friday's concert at Cornish College of the Arts' PONCHO Concert Hall, SMO will be performing the chamber-orchestra version of Reich's "Eight Lines," which adds a second string quartet to the original score's eight players. The piece moves to a single insistent pulse, with a whole lot happening within that pulse. If you don't nail the pulse, you lose the effect.

"That's true of all of Reich's music," Tai says, adding with a laugh: "I always tell the orchestra: A train is going and if you fall off, I can't save you."

Nancarrow is best known for his player-piano studies. But Piece No. 2 for Small Orchestra, for 16 live players, is one of the few items he wrote for an orchestral ensemble.

Why aren't there more?

"He was in isolation for most of his life," Tai explains, "and there's no point in writing for an ensemble if there's nobody who's going to perform it."

The maverick American composer (1912-1997) lived for decades in Mexico City, and it wasn't until late in his career that he won widespread recognition, notably with a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1982. That led to commissions, including one for Piece No. 2, which had its premiere at a Nancarrow retrospective at New York's Lincoln Center in 1986.

The piece is less manic than his player-piano pieces, which are technically impossible for human hands to play. Yet it still has some wild fun, with its 16 instrumentalists all following their own rhythmic track.

French composer Grisey's "Talea" is the work that triggered the whole "Layers of Time" concept for Jolley and Tai.

"As we looked at how the piece was made," Jolley recalls, "the layer of time was critical. So that was the great assignment. What are pieces that present, in a different light, this idea that is so quintessential to music? Music is in time — you cannot separate the two."

Grisey himself said the title "Talea" referred to a medieval musical form in which rhythm structures and timbral "colors" fall in and out of phase with one another. More fancifully, he saw the musical phrases he employed as "rank weeds pushing up in the interstices of [a] machine." In the final stretch, they grow in importance until they achieve "an entirely unexpected coloration."

Tai's other big news is that she's the new music director of Philharmonia Northwest. There, she says, she's trying to strike a balance between pieces familiar to the ensemble and work the musicians have never played before. The Feb. 5 concert will match Mozart's Symphony No. 31 in D Major with two Villa-Lobos works: Sinfonietta No. 1 in B Flat Major and Bachianas Brasileiras No. 3. The latter is scored for piano and orchestra, with Geisa Dutra as the guest soloist.

The Villa-Lobos pieces, she adds, aren't often played in Seattle: "It's beautiful music."

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com