THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 83
bine to make “Debussy Rameau” one
of the most entrancing piano records
of recent years.
I
f Ólafsson’s disk offers a refuge of
otherworldly beauty, “Extinction
Events and Dawn Chorus,” a 2018
work by the Australian composer Liza
Lim, confronts us with the cata
strophic reality of the world as it is.
The piece can be heard on a new re
cording by Klangforum Wien, on Kai
ros. It is scored for twelve musicians—
four winds, three brass, three strings,
piano, percussion—and it is domi
nated by seething, roiling, corrosive
textures. At the same time, it echoes
the fragmentary melodies of animal
voices that have yet to be crushed by
the anthropogenic apocalypse. The
composer cites Shakespeare’s Sonnet
65 in her program note: “How with
this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”
Lim also makes mention of the
“vast conglomerations of plastic trash”
that float in the oceans and disinte
grate into toxic particles. She alludes
to the awful image of albatross chicks
choking on plastic fragments that
their mothers have mistaken for food.
The extinction of species is likened
to the passing away of cultural forms:
musical styles, languages, maps. In the
score, these processes of obliteration
are mimicked in distortions of instru
mental voices: coarse attacks, under
blown and overblown notes, tongue
slaps, glissandos, all manner of scrap
ing and scrubbing sounds in the per
cussion. Sonic eddies form, with a
motif getting caught in a repeating
pattern before breaking free. At one
point, we hear the noise of crinkling
cellophane. Birdlike calls periodically
ring out, but they are confined, des
perate, strangulated.
This tumultuous soundscape never
feels needlessly assaultive or brutal—a
tribute to Lim’s keen ear for instru
mental writing and to her knack for
tracing musical gestures that have the
fluid shape of organic life. She seems
to adopt the point of view of the
suffering earth, or even of the lifeless
objects that we have ejected into the
environment. “There is broken gran
deur,” she writes, “and there are at
tempts to sing.” The phrase “broken
grandeur” captures the music’s mes
merizing impact. Ruin is ennobled
without being prettified, aestheticized,
pushed into the mental distance.
The final section of the piece,
“Dawn Chorus,” takes a turn toward
the hopeful, though it is a low, muted
kind of hope. It is a chorus not of
birds but of fish—various “chatter
box” species that inhabit Australian
coral reefs and make grunting, hoot
ing, and droning noises as the sun
rises. To approximate these ritual calls,
Lim has her performers set aside their
instruments and twirl wind wands
(resonators with stretched rubber
bands) and operate waldteufels (small
drums that make a croaking sound as
a cord is drawn through the mem
brane). Brass tones emerge from those
textures and build to a majestic roar
before fading to a subterranean mur
mur, with the contrabassoonist using
a tube extension to produce tones
below the range of human hearing.
As I listened to “Extinction Events”
during the coronavirus shutdown, I
was reminded of how the longsup
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pressed music of nature has swelled
in volume as humanity goes into tem
porary retreat.
D
uring the weeks of quarantine,
homebound music lovers have
been depending more than usual on
recordings and streaming music. The
likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and You
Tube have doubtless profited from the
surge, as have major labels and super
star artists. But the paltry royalties doled
out by the streaming services will not
save the working musicians who have
lost income during the shutdown. The
virus has exposed more clearly than
ever the vicious economic logic of the
streaming era, which favors monopo
listic consolidation and consumer con
venience over an equitable distribution
of profits across the musical ecosystem.
An extinction event is looming over
the performing arts, and it calls for a
change of practices. When we take music
for free off the Internet, we should seek
ways to give concrete support to the
people who made it. Sites such as Band
camp have a far more generous way of
sharing revenue, though nothing equals
the impact of paying for a recording di
rectly: the income from a single CD
sale is equivalent to that of more than
a thousand streams. Streaming also ex
acts a hidden environmental toll, in the
form of increased carbon emissions gen
erated by electricityconsuming servers.
If the performing arts are to retain a
place in our society, we will have to re
think how we value them—economi
cally, culturally, politically. For now, we
can try to repay artists for the immense
library of music that we have been given,
or, more precisely, that we have taken.
