Text: Agnus Dei from the Ordinary of the Mass

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In composing an a cappella piece for Apollo5, Gabrielle Liriano drew th dots between Byrd’s five-part Mass and her own Afro-Dominican background, writes Matthew Power

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Coming home to New Jersey and completing a Master’s degree in composition at Montclair State University (MSU), Gabrielle Liriano emphasises to be embedded in a community where she can make music with ithers on a social scale. First, though, how did music start to feature in the life of this bassoonist, singer, and composer?

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‘I would say that I came out of the womb making music! It was always built into my personality and it evolved as I grew,’ she explains. ‘When I was little, it was pop music; I was of the Britney Spears generation. I sang in choir, played flute in band and every teacher along the way gave me something special.’

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She discovered music notation software aged 14. ‘I couldn’t stop putting notes together trying to figure out how to make the sounds in my head translate to the page.’

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At Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, Liriano embarked on a four-year Bachelor’s degree in music, studying for a semester in Valencia, Spain, where she took most of her liberal arts classes. Alongside composition and core music were studies in jazz, Afro-Caribbean drumming, and the history of African American music in the USA. ‘All these eclectic classes make you more rounded as a musician.’

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Inspirational teachers have been key to immersing herself in the music of other composers. ‘Back at high school we had a band teacher who was able to describe the lives of the great composers and make them sound magical,’ she recalls. ‘He kept talking about talking about [Stravinsky’s] The Rite of Spring. When I first listened to it, aged 15, I was transported into another world!’ Liriano says that it is late 19th- and early 20th-century composers whose music interests her most. Why that period? ‘There are two things: the aspects of Stravinsky and Bartók, plus the impressionistic style of Debussy and Ravel, for example. Stravinsky’s music is so energetic, and he reached into the [the music of] other cultures- although he never admitted that-and blended them into a more rhythmic and modern western European sound. I am of Dominican heritage, born in the USA, and there is something about that journey into my culture that speaks to me, especially the Afro-centric parts, because those are missing in much classical music.’ While at MSU she wrote a work for symphony orchestra that explores a mixture of Dominican folk music and early 20th-century sounds.

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Now Liriano looks forward to establishing a network of musical relationships. ‘I am building community where I want to be, with local musicians whom I can visit easily. Berklee was incredible, but it was a diverse international space; people came from all over and then left. I want to be interconnected with like-minded musicians with whom I can make art.’

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Returning again to influential teachers, Liriano pinpoints two such from Berklee. ‘Eleanor Aversa [associate professor of composition] could tell that I would get stuck sometimes trying to develop ideas; she was the one who really pushed me into improvisation. I’m a bassoonist and singer; on the surface, the bassoon doesn’t lend itself to improvisation, but Eleanor threw that idea away. She set me an assignment; to sit for half an hour and play without judgement whatever came to mind and record it on my phone, then to notate everything that I had played. Putting it on paper, you start to see patterns that you created subconsciously without “composing” in the normal sense.’

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Oboe professor Barbara LaFitte, until recently principal oboe in the prestigious Boston Ballet Orchestra, was another mentor. ‘She had this kind of Zen energy... At her contemporary chamber ensemble class, for the first 10 minutes we would improvise freely, without a key or meter, yet it always made sense, it was always beautiful and communicative. She was able to meld these two worlds of music and I took as many of her classes as I could.’

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Later at MSU, Liriano developed her own ‘music slams,’ following ideas from a jazz workshop with Kenny Werner and books about free play by Stephen Nachmanovitch, to unite musicians who wouldn’t normally improvise together. I remember a similar class from my own college days in which improvisation between players could become like a hyper-language where every note seemed new, and we would listen to each other more intently than we perhaps would to a traditional performance. In her slams Liriano incorporated breathing exercises and ice-breaking games to develop trust and create a safe space in which to explore.

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This year at MSU, VOCES8 and A Roomful of Teeth workshopped and recorded her Choral City Blues for eight singers. What interaction did she have with them? ‘That workshop was magical! Pieces were very much in the style that VOCES8 usually sing, a cathedra-like choral sound. Then when they saw my piece they just started laughing because it looks so different in a graphic format. It’s quite goofy and I tried to capture the sounds of the city of Boston; airplane noises, crosswalk sounds, ambulances, backing-up trucks, cars... the two tenors are cars racing each other and the climax of the piece they each other and start arguing. It’s a funny cacophony of sounds exploring what the voice can achieve in different kooky ways. I want to use it widely, it really brings people out of their shells.’

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O Lamb of God is written for the SATTB line up of Apollo5, The group’s founder Clare Stewart asked Liriano to write a piece inspired by Byrd’s Mass for five voices and chose the Agnus Dei as her material. ‘I was grateful to receive notes about the singers’ voices, which also specified the “golden” parts of their ranges.’ she says. ‘I tried to hit the sweet spots in their voices and I had to change the key a couple of times to make that work well. Part of my style is trying to subvert the traditional sounds of western music, in this case [making] something more rhythmic. I wanted it to have some contrasting energy to Byrd setting so that it will give a different life to the same text.’

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This attractive piece has a hypnotic quality and I can imagine it working equally well for a larger chorus. The texture is light and dancelike, alternating with a toanl language of stillness and colour. What tips does Liriano have for choirs who might perform it? ‘Lean into those clashing notes and don’t be afraid of them! Have fun with the rhythmic parts; I incorporated clapping because I didn’t want the piece to become rigid.’

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Indeed, rhythm and its comparative side-lining in western musical development may form a subject doctoral research in the future, Liriano thinks. ‘I would like to research the peoples whose music most exercises the most intricate rhythms and document it to create a lexicon of rhythmic [idioms] that we don’t have words for, such as different kinds of polyrhythms. I’m still working on that journey of melding my Afro-Dominican roots with western music.’