Yolanda Kondonassis: FIVE MINUTES for Earth
Azica Records

In harpist Yolanda Kondonassis's own words, Five Minutes for Earth is a “musical ode to our Earth in all its glory, beauty, and pain—past, present, and future.” Yet as celebratory as such an affirmation is, there's no denying a worrisome undercurrent is present when implicit in much of the material created for the project is concern for a planet experiencing the destabilizing impact of climate change. As someone who's been active in Earth conservation for more than two decades and runs a non-profit organization called Earth at Heart, it's something Kondonassis's knows about deeply, which makes Five Minutes for Earth as personal a project as could be imagined. It's also timely; as she states, “What is at stake … is only everything we have.”

To create the project, she asked fifteen composers in 2020 to create five-minute solo harp pieces that would deal with the planet in some way. The response was enthusiastic, with Jocelyn Chambers, Chen Yi, Michael Daugherty, Daniel Dorff, Reena Esmail, Keith Fitch, Patrick Harlin, Stephen Hartke, Nathaniel Heyder, Takuma Itoh, Aaron Jay Kernis, Philip Maneval, Máximo Diego Pujol, Gary Schocker, and Zhou Long all providing works to Kondonassis. For listeners, Five Minutes for Earth is a rewarding treat; for harpists, it's indispensable for presenting in a single package a panoramic array of harp treatments, from pedal slides and percussive effects to string-bending—according to her, “just about every innovative, contemporary effect in the book.” By way of illustration, Kondonassis uses glissandos, tremolos, pedal buzzes, rocket slides, and harmonics to bring Esmail's ethereal soundscape inconvenient wounds to life; what the harpist deems a “Wet Whistle” effect appears during Dorff's Meditation at Perkiomen Creek when a wet cloth slides along the vertical length of a single string to generate a high, bird whistle-like cry, and at album's end, Hartke's Fault Line arrests the ear with an extensive application of pedal glissandos and buzzes.

Reflecting the sincerity of her commitment, she's donating the royalties that accrue from the release to Earth-related causes and has vowed that every verified performance by a harpist of any of the works will be followed by a monetary donation from her company to a recognized earth conservation organization. To the cynic who questions what difference a harp recording might make, Kondonassis has an eloquent response: “When we see an idea expressed in the language of music, dance, visual art, or poetry, those sensory experiences often open the mind and heart to interaction and reaction in ways that mere facts may not.”

The harp lends itself superbly to the dynamic range of expression encompassed by the material. It can be both celestial and earthy, and whether a piece calls for a delicate, fragile voicing or a thunderous one, she and her instrument are up to the challenge. The general tone is set by Itoh's Kohola Sings, which, as its title implies, renders the song of the humpback whale into musical form. While string-bending techniques evoke the stirring sound of the creature's song in the opening section, it's the graceful patterns that follow that more powerfully capture the beauty of the magnificent creature and the humble awe we feel when we catch a glimpse of it at the ocean's surface. Moving from water to land, Daugherty's Hear the Dust evokes 1930s dust storms in Oklahoma and Texas by recasting the old American folk song “Down in the Valley” and augmenting it with original music. This time Kondonassis enhances the composer's stately material with harmonics, knocks, fluxes, and other textures to suggest dust swirls as well as the stillness of the landscape. Kernis's On Hearing Nightbirds at Dusk invites an appreciation of the sounds another non-human species makes, in this case amidst the stillness of night.

The pretty medieval character of Schocker's Memory of Trees hints that the piece might have been designed to suggest a song set centuries ago; yet the composer's image of a singer standing in a forest telling us that it may soon be empty of trees and home to wind only gives the piece a thoroughly contemporary relevance. Fitch's haunting as Earth dreams assumes a rather eerie quality when three of the harp's strings are de-tuned by a quarter step, and Kondonassis's comment that for her whispers of Takemitsu's writing emerge in Fitch's austere meditation is on-point. While one setting might amplify the inherent prettiness of the harp's sonorities (e.g., Harlin's Time Lapse), another might explore it from a different angle; Long's Green, for instance, newly arranged for solo harp after being written for Chinese bamboo flute and pipa in 1983, adds contemporary Asian sonorities to the recording's soundworld.

Space doesn't permit a detailed account of each piece, but suffice it to say each composer addresses the theme thoughtfully and with imagination. Some deal with it through a meditation on the planet itself, others by drawing attention to the lives of the creatures with whom we share it. Whereas Yi drew for inspiration from Earth's majestic blue mountains for his poetic, tremolos-enhanced Dark Mountains, Pujol looked to the Argentine Pampas for Milonga para mi Tierra, a melancholy expression that vividly conveys affection for his homeland. Chambers and Maneval deal movingly with the impact of global warming on glaciers in her Melting Point and his The Demise of the Shepard Glacier, respectively.

June 2022