The Boston Globe - 13.09.2019

G2 The Boston Globe FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2019

In “Fringe,” Clint Baclawski’s new show at Ab-

igail Ogilvy Gallery, a glowing billboard — his

signature format — becomes an altar, a sacred

site at the heart of the space.

To make his billboards, Baclawski slices a gi-

ant photographic transparency into slivers that

he wraps around tubular light bulbs. The Boston

artist places the light bulbs side by side against a

mirrored ground. Stand in front, and it’s an ab-

straction; stand at the end, and the image co-

heres.

A curtain of transparent cobalt blue plastic

strips surrounds this one. Baclawski’s imagery

glows groggily through it in swimming-pool

green. Beneath it, warm light seeps along the

floor, beckoning, like sunlight mixed with white

wine and honey, a yellow-gold I felt I couldn’t

live without.

The curtain has three sides. The side closest

to a wall — the one visitors are most likely to ig-

nore — has a break between strips, where the

light pours out in a shaft onto the wall, hinting at

a glorious portal.

Inside the curtain, it’s nearly blinding at first,

an assault of light, a wall of yellow smudged here

and there with orange. What felt warm and invit-

ing from the outside now felt a little sickening.

Too much honeyed wine.

In time, my eyes adjusted. I walked around.

The splinters of imagery began to coalesce. First,

a cross in the middle. Then, two. A roofline. That

helped my mind map the image: a small church,

fir trees.

Baclawski photographed it five years ago near

the Grand Canyon. At the airport on the way

home, a TSA agent opened the film and exposed

it. That’s why it’s so unrelievedly yellow, its shad-

ows an acrid orange. There are scratches on the

film. The image is not beautiful. It’s marred, glar-

ing, and hard to read. When you do read it, it’s

scruffy and humble. But the experience of it feels

revelatory.

With “Fringe,” Baclawski models the enchant-

ments and perils of desire. From afar, an object

of yearning — a lover, salvation, relief from pain

— floods the imagination with its perfections.

When you come face to face with it, the allure

may still be there. But so is reality, and its endless

and fruitful complications.

Cate McQuaid can be reached at

[email protected]. Follow her on

Twitter @cmcq.

W

hen he was a child, the
Irish composer Don-
nacha Dennehy would
visit the small farm
where his maternal
grandmother lived. She sometimes host-
ed what he called “sessions,” in which her
neighbors would drop by to recite a poem
or sing a song. One kind of song made an
especially potent impression on Dennehy.
It seemed to emanate from a different
sound world, one in which the notes
“seemed to float radically between nor-
mal pitches as I knew them,” he recalled
during a recent interview. He would later
learn that these were a particular variant
of traditional song known as “sean-nós”
(“old style”).
“They had a lamenting quality to
them,” Dennehy said by phone from his
home in Princeton. But “just like in Irish
dancing where people dance with the
back straight and only move the legs,
there’s also a kind of restraint to it, too.”
Years later, Dennehy would realize
that the notes that “fell between the
cracks” in sean-nós were not so different
from the microtones that had become
part of his own musical language, based
in large part on the overtone series (in
short: the pitches that resonate, at pro-
gressively more distant frequencies, in a
given note).
That insight — an unexpected meeting
between tradition and avant-garde —

opened new possibilities for Dennehy’s

composing. One of the first fruits was a

major vocal work (“Grá agus Bás”) writ-

ten for the singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, whom

he calls “the most fascinating and defin-

ing sean-nós singer alive.”

The sean-nós influence was also criti-

cal to “The Hunger,” a music theater piece

on Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845-52.

Dennehy began composing the piece in

2012. Separate from its place in his musi-
      cal syntax, sean-nós was also “the voice of
      the people who suffered” during the ca-
      tastrophe. Dennehy completed the stage
      version of “The Hunger” in 2016 and pre-
      pared a concert adaptation in 2018. The
      latter version comes to Jordan Hall on
      Sept. 20, in a performance by the emi-
      nent new music ensemble Alarm Will
      Sound, which just released a recording of
      the piece on Nonesuch. (Proceeds from
      the concert, which also includes music by
      the New York-based composer Earthe-
      ater, benefit Oxfam America.)
      Though Dennehy thought about writ-
      ing a piece about the famine for years, he
      initially found it difficult to locate his en-
      try point. The path was opened by “An-

nals of the Famine in Ireland,” an 1851

eyewitness account by the American re-

former Asenath Nicholson, who went to

Ireland to record the plight of the coun-

try’s starving poor. A series of her obser-

vations, set for soprano, form one of the

main strands of “The Hunger.” The other

is a character invented by Dennehy — an

old man in “the last stages of starvation”

— to be sung by Ó Lionáird. His part was

constructed largely from one of the few

sean-nós songs to be written during the

famine.

Throughout much of the piece the two

characters sing audibly distinct music —

Nicholson’s objective, chilling narrative

set against the old man’s keening yet re-

strained sorrow, softly colored by Den-

nehy’s unsettling harmonies. The overall

structure of “The Hunger” lies in the way

the two perspectives gradually merge.

Nicholson goes from observer to compas-

sionate participant, almost begging for

help, and her music takes on some of the

piercing dissonances of the sean-nós ma-

terial. “A, A, A trúa!” (What sorrow!”)

they both sing at the end.

“There’s a flow that really accumulates

through the piece,” the composer ex-

plained. “This kind of long-term unravel-

ing of something, where you feel the sep-

arateness of them at the start, and then

they’re both caught up in this energy of

this unfolding [process] that’s out of their

hands.”

In the stage version of “The Hunger,”

the musical sections are intercut with

videos of political scientists and econo-

mists (Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman)

that explain the economic underpinnings

of the famine while drawing parallels to

other tragedies. Dennehy compared

these voices to “a Greek chorus,” there to

emphasize and draw lessons from the

famine’s contemporary relevance. (Some

critics have not taken kindly to this part

of the piece.)

In the concert version, by contrast, the

focus is entirely on the two characters,

and the unfolding seems to happen in an

almost dreamlike state. That was inten-

tional on Dennehy’s part.

“It was really important that there was

a kind of distance, that was almost beau-

tiful,” he said. “It’s like in a David Lynch

film where something terrible happens

and there’s just this beauty [everywhere].

And it registers more of an impact on you

because of that than if you’re hammered

over the head with all systems agreeing.”

David Weininger can be reached at

[email protected]. Follow

him on Twitter @davidgweininger.

By Marc Hirsh

GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

W

hen the Pixies reunited in 2004, it seemed obvious

that the point was to finally, literally capitalize on

the slow-burn rise in stature that they’d experi-

enced in the dozen years since they’d originally

split. A new song, the joyous grind “Bam Thwok,”

appeared almost immediately, but that seemed to be merely proof of

concept for the reunion. Even (or especially) as the tours racked up in

the decade that followed, it didn’t seem like anyone expected the re-

vived Pixies to be anything other than a live act. Then came 2014’s “In-

die Cindy,” and it was no longer sufficient for the Pixies to simply show

up. Now they had to produce.

“Beneath the Eyrie,” out Friday, is album number three of the Pixies

Mark II, well beyond the point where it would be acceptable for them

to churn out reiteration after reiteration of the music they had before.

(In fact, you could argue the same about album number three of the

Pixies Mark I.) So it’s under-

standable that the band has

morphed to a point where it’s

no longer simply hitting famil-

iar beats (and shrieks). But it’s

not clear what the band that

made “Beneath the Eyrie”

wants to be.

For evidence, look no fur-

ther than “Ready For Love” and

“On Graveyard Hill,” both con-

structed around drummer Da-

vid Lovering’s driving,

hunched-over thwack, Joey

Santiago’s scrawling guitar, and

(on the former) Black Francis

and bassist Paz Lenchantin sharing a familiar male/female unison vo-

cal. They’re practically textbook Pixies, except for the fact that they

come and go without incident (hardly a Pixies trademark). That lack

of distinctiveness pervades “Beneath the Eyrie,” both on a song-by-

song basis and taken as a whole. The superchunky “Catfish Kate” has

a poppy bounce but not much of a center, lacking the rictus grin that

gave “Here Comes Your Man” its juice, and some neat shuddering

punctuating “Silver Bullet” can’t save it from being an imperious glare

that says less than it lets on.

A few songs are effective on their own terms. “Los Surfers Muer-

tos” is dreamy, albeit with a dark undertow, and Black Francis sings

with an aggressive, guttural growl that’s quite effective on the murky

surf-rock of “St. Nazaire.” And some of the old magic bleeds through

in the strangest places. Leave it to the Pixies to come up with a dusky

lounge-country tune called “Death Horizon” and use it to end the al-

bum on an upbeat note, somehow. And ghostly harmonies and melod-

icism light up the gorgeously slow-charging “Daniel Boone.” It doesn’t

sound like the Pixies the way the old Pixies sounded like the Pixies. It

sounds like the Pixies in a new and different way. “Beneath the Eyrie”

could’ve used a lot more like it.

Marc Hirsh can be reached at [email protected].

ABIGAIL OGILVY GALLERY

Far from

the full story

A new work by

Boston artist

Clint Baclawski

rethinks the

relationship

between

distance

and desire

Clint

Baclawski’s

“Fringe”

CLINT

BACLAWSKI:

FRINGE

At Abigail

Ogilvy Gallery,

460 Harrison

Ave., through

Oct. 13. 617-

820-5173,

http://www.abigail

ogilvy.com

GALLERIES| CATE MCQUAID

CLASSICAL NOTES| DAVID WEININGER

Finding the modern

in an Irish song tradition

ALARM WILL SOUND

At Jordan Hall, Sept. 20, 8 p.m.

Tickets $25-$250. 617-585-1260,

http://www.necmusic.edu

BRITT OLSEN-ECKER

Irish composer Donnacha

Dennehy thought about

writing a piece about the

Great Famine for years.

Insider

The Pixies’

‘Beneath the Eyrie’

offers only glimpses

of the old magic

ALBUM REVIEW