Though composer Christopher Cerrone might not be a household name among classical listeners, he is a frequent favorite among the ensembles, artists, and organizations promoting contemporary American composers. Consider that the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Roomful of Teeth, The Crossing, Pittsburgh Opera, LA Opera, Lorelei Ensemble, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the Louisville Symphony, among many others, have commissioned or performed his work — with the composer, born in 1984, just over the age of 40. His life’s accomplishments are already enough to make any of his peers wince with jealousy (myself included, staring wistfully at unrecorded manuscripts...). So what exactly makes Cerrone’s music so appealing?
For one: his musical vocabulary. Cerrone is deeply interested in texture and timbre as it relates to the ideas he wants to convey, and is able to conjure distinct soundscapes through unconventional instrumental effects in service to those ideas. He balances the effects' unique and jarring character through his second compositional gift: his harmonic language.
While Cerrone’s use of harmony is relatively conventional when compared to his peers, as it can usually be labeled under a specific key (or at least be chartered around pitch centricity), it is uniquely his own in that his harmonies are often inspired and informed by other works of art, such as literature or architecture, which uplift and transcend the soundscape he creates.
That being said, Cerrone’s music also has distinct influences from composers before his generation. First and foremost to my ear is Steve Reich, whose penchant for audible musical processes, extensive use of percussion from around the globe, and cellular character of his music all find themselves employed in Cerrone’s work. Additionally, Reich’s harmonic language can be heard as parental to Cerrone’s in its frequently diatonic but non-functioning character (that is to say: it could be labeled in a particular key, but doesn’t necessarily follow that key’s rules or expected patterns). Listen to an excerpt from Reich’s “Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ” compared to a clip of Cerrone’s “Ode to Joy”:
In both pieces, it’s immediately apparent that the composers are utilizing repeated cell-based musical fragments and share a fondness for a distinctly harmonious percussion section. Their major differences are in their aesthetic and compositional goals. Reich wants the listener to hear his processes unfold fully, shifting like a glacier that is melting slowly under sunlight, reflecting colorful and prismatic shifts over time. On the other hand, Cerrone stacks his cells side by side and tinkers with them in real time, making micro-adjustments from one bar to the next and to the next, as if each cell were a shapeshifting rocket bursting through time. Cerrone's cells freely overlap and interject with one another as if by improvisation, yet flow organically and so satisfyingly. While Cerrone is interested in having his processes heard by the listener, his real goal is to use them to express something more: in this case, joy. As Cerrone writes in the program notes to this piece:
“Six is a lot of percussion quartets. When surveying the prior five [that I composed], I found a relatively wide range of emotions: from contemplative to dramatic to mysterious to elegiac. But one felt missing: joy. This composition—through its use of simple, optimistic harmonies and pulsating rhythms—seeks to remedy that. Its title playfully references the iconic Beethoven tune, but the source is one of America’s, and one of New York City’s, great joy-havers: the poet Frank O’Hara. His poem of the same name iterates an enthusiastic passion for the city I have long called home—a passion I felt more urgently while living in Europe on a residency.
One more thing about joy: Joy is hard. It’s much easier to feel anger, sadness, or nothing. That hardness is part of the piece. While writing, I set these harmonicas in unison against bowed crotales and vibraphones. Despite the best efforts of these excellent musicians, none of these instruments will ever sound entirely in tune with one another. These imperfections, these distances between the joys I have in my life and the joys I aspire toward, are something I have come to embrace.”
The second most immediately discernable compositional influence in Cerrone’s work would be Gérard Grisey. Until his death in 1998, Grisey was one of the leading voices of the Spectralist movement in music, which sought to utilize the acoustic properties of sound and the harmonic series as a basis from which to compose music. Though Cerrone is not particularly interested in composing for the sake of Spectralist exploration, he is very much interested in the instrumental effects and techniques which Spectralists use to achieve their end result, and particularly those used by Grisey. Compare the opening movement of Grisey’s “Vortex Temporum” to the second movement of Cerrone’s “Don’t Look Down”:
Though vastly different in their character and goals, there is a clear overlap in their shared interest of instrumental effects, the use of microtonal harmony (notes “between the notes”) as musical coloration, and complex rhythmic layering to evoke a unique sound world.
Less obvious, but still very present, influences in Cerrone’s music are alt rock, electronic, and ambient music. There’s a good reason for that. Per Cerrone via 15questions.net:
“I started studying classical piano at the age of 5, but my youth was dominated by alternative rock like Nirvana and Radiohead—the soundtrack of 90’s American suburbia—and electronic music like Björk and Aphex Twin. Around the age of 17, after seeing the movie ‘A Clockwork Orange’, I worked my way backwards from Wendy Carlos’s electronic re-imaginings of Beethoven to actual Beethoven symphonies and became obsessed. Suddenly the notion of composing long scale works for classical instruments and orchestras was the only thing that interested me. At that point I enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music in New York and discovered much of the music that continues to influence me—the minimalism of Reich, Glass, and Adams; Stravinsky; the spectralism of Grisey; and the New York School, particularly Feldman and Cage. Later, all the music of my youth which I’d shut away [at] 17 filtered back in, as I became comfortable with loving all the influences in my life equally.”
So that’s Christopher Cerrone. A steady diet of pop and alternative music in his youth, balanced by modernist masters and contemporary mainstays in his later years, along with an ever-curious artistic mind, led to the polished product we hear today in his music — and polished it is. From the driving, endlessly irresistible rhythms of "Don’t Look Down"...
...to the sonorous, bell-like clangs of "A Natural History of Vacant Lots," in its exquisite juxtaposition of abandoned urbanism and the often unappreciated beauty that lies within...
...and the grungy, textural setting of fellow contemporary classical enthusiast G.C. Waldrep’s poetry in "Goldbeater’s Skin."
There is something to love for just about everyone in Cerrone’s music, and especially in the album "Don’t Look Down." That is not something that can easily be said about any artist, let alone a living one, working in an increasingly intellectually impenetrable field such as contemporary classical music. For that, I will sing Cerrone’s praises until I am blue in the face, then sing them some more.
