Review | Musically Swept Away by yMusic, with New Gabriella Smith Piece, ‘Aquatic Ecology’

Some of the greatest and most engrossing music virtually defies attempts to define or categorize it, in discussions or writings. You have to be there to get its essence, and preferably in a live context. Among the countless examples of ineffable music are Bach’s keyboard works, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Miles Davis’s mid-60s quartet music, and side two of the Beatles’ Abbey Road. To sink into those musical worlds is to surrender to their internal realities and admit to the inadequacy of analytical logic or mere words to describe the experience.

Attempts to describe the full impact and nature of the new work by important young composer Gabriella Smith, Aquatic Ecology, seems another fine example of music resistant to simple explanation. As heard in Hahn Hall last Monday, the centerpiece work in a concert by the progressive chamber group yMusic, Smith’s 40-minute (but never dull) opus blends diverse musical languages with field recordings — underwater field recordings, specifically — of crackling shrimp, glacial ice melting, and the songs of whales and dolphins.

But no, this is not a new age-y spin-off of the 1970s-spun impulse to tap humpback whale songs or other environmental soundscapes in the service of pleasant aural wallpaper. Smith, an avid and avowed ecologist with serious concerns for life in our perilous climate change era, extends her natural worldly interests with her evolving musical worldly inventiveness into yet another realm.

Aquatic Ecology, originally advertised as a premiere as part of the Music Academy of the West’s fascinating “off-season” “Mariposa” series, ended being born (premiere-wise) at UC Berkeley two nights earlier. But there was no mistaking the freshness and vitality of this latest entry in Smith’s distinctive and growing musical catalogue, and it was clearly one of Santa Barbara’s “events of the season” in this year’s classical calendar in town.

While the Smith work was undoubtedly the main event of the evening at Hahn Hall, we also got a hearty taste of what makes this new music ensemble special, with short works created collaboratively by the sextet, touching on post-Minimalist, loose-fit coloristic flourishes and other expressive areas.

This is the third major Smith work to land in the 805, following the string quartet Carrot Revolution at the Ojai Music Festival in 2021 and a premiere weekend performance of her cello concerto Lost Coast with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at The Granada Theatre in 2003 (that piece written for cellist Gabriel Cabezas, part of yMusic). Aquatic Ecology logically follows in line with her earlier work while stepping into new zones and waters (so to speak), blending her influences from early to Modernist music to art pop and a more purely sonic pursuit of new textural and instrumental interactivity relationships.

Abstraction and atonality mix with more focused thematic material in the score, without the disparate parts detracting from a cohesive whole: Her eclecticism doesn’t result in pastiche-style mash-ups but rather seeks out an over-arcing unity. And in this case, the calls and sounds of the underwater wilds fold subtly into the mix, external sonic stimuli which sometimes trigger instrumental conversations with the sounds, and sometimes not. Aquatic Ecology both surprises and states its eco-artistic case in confident and yet hard-to-describe ways.

One measure of the ability of Smith to lure us into another of her sound worlds in the piece is the level of engagement (to these ears, in any case). As the music reaches its finale, we wonder “did they cut it short? Could that really have been 40 minutes?”

On some level, the piece plays like an elegy for a planet in peril. On the musical plane, it’s an affirmation that creative new musical ideas worth diving into can ease the pain of life in a troubled natural and political world.