In Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5, a solo flutist pushes and shoves through ever widening intervallic leaps in a tumultuous journey that contrasts climactic highs with pensive, even fatigued lows. Even within such moments of introspection, Density (and its performers) always find ways to remain propulsive, and it is just that sense of momentum that enervates its latest successor: Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s UBIQUE (Feb. 28, Sono Luminus).
As the tenth installment of Claire Chase’s Density 2036 commissioning series, UBIQUE pairs Chase with a sensitive and timbrally imaginative ensemble featuring Seth Parker Woods and Katinka Kleijn on cellos and Cory Smythe on piano. Inspired – but certainly not limited – by Varèse’s iconic 1936 solo, Anna’s contribution to the project begins with the familiar Density 21.5 motif (half step down, whole step up), but quickly spins into something very different.
From Latin, the word “ubique” translates to “everywhere.” As Anna writes in her program notes, “The work is inspired by the notion of being everywhere at the same time, an enveloping omnipresence, while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle, echoed in various forms of fragmentation and interruption… throughout the piece, sounds are both reduced to their smallest particles and their atmospheric presence expanded towards the infinite.”
Even as the piece’s 11 parts contrast in character and pacing, various recurring devices show just how seriously Anna takes the connotation of “omnipresence.” For example, “Part I” and “Part II” perpetually move the listener back to a slowly unwinding melody, a stepwise descent that constantly changes its pitch center. At first, it’s difficult to discern amidst a patchwork of held tones. Each new entrance occurs in a different register, and the overlapping sustained tones focus on harmony over melody.
Slowly, though, a minor third begins to feel more like a foundation; always audible and keenly in focus, it’s passed through each performer in the ensemble. Yet these returns never remind us of how far we’ve come in our journey, á la Varèse. Instead, hearing familiar material feels more like being pulled back to reality, as though the intervening five, ten, twenty minutes between them were diversions that had lasted less than a moment.
Anna’s careful orchestration also exerts a powerful temporal push and pull. The accumulations of low-register piano and cello clusters in “Part III” highlight a dense constellation of upper partials; experiencing the frisson of these overtones feels delightfully, grindingly slow. But Chase’s extended-technique soliloquies in “Part II” and “Part VIII” dramatically speed up the pace. Quick timbral changes of air, tongue rams, fricative consonants, and key clicks amplified by the bass flute’s long tube speed through minutes at a time. Throughout UBIQUE, Anna’s enforcement of rapid perceptual shifts purposefully destabilizes the listener’s sense of continuity.
Some of these are downright jarring. “Part II” features an almost comically contrastive syncopated cello duet, and a stirringly genuine ballad. However, such left-field interjections don’t quite manage to draw a boundary or pull the listener into a new frame of reference. These flashes of novelty are too brief, stopping just shy of feeling separate, self-contained. As a result, when something familiar returns, it’s productively disorienting, prompting the listener to consider how Anna’s pulseless, “omnipresent” base might actually be splintered into many parallel branches.
When New York Times critic Seth Colter Walls reviewed UBIQUE as part of a Density 2036 showcase in the summer of 2023, he observed that its repetition might be more interesting if it developed more of the opening material. (Admittedly, to ask a listener to hold 50 minutes’ worth of material in their mind to reflect on an eternal “now” is a challenge bordering on impossibility.) Yet I think his criticism is rooted in a mode of listening that UBIQUE defies – it’s not straightforwardly narrative in the same model as Density 21.5, nor does it possess the kind of goal-less stasis that we might expect from a description like “ambient” or “drone.” Rather, it asks the listener to bounce between the immediacy of perception and a calculated interrogation of how each piece fits into the form: when have I heard this before, and what does it mean now? Even if Anna’s goal to “expand toward the infinite” remains a bit out of reach, UBIQUE still delivers on its exploration of energy’s ebbs, flows, and sudden transformations.
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