Theresa Wong - Journey to the Cave of Guanyin

A Closer Listen

Good questions are always more interesting than their answers. “What does the cello sound like?” seeks a factual, closed response, which most of us could easily produce in fairly short order. Through her work, however, Bay Area-based composer and Guggenheim Fellow Theresa Wong poses a much more adventurous and generative inquiry: “What can the cello sound like?”

Wong has spent years honing a searching and idiosyncratic approach to the instrument, exploring the materiality of its physical components as well as the harmonic possibilities opened up by reaching beyond the purview of classical Western canon. She experiments with alternative tuning systems as well as playing techniques including both bowed and plucked engagements with strings, string preparation, and the percussive potential of the wooden body itself. Her work operates in an uncanny space between sound art and songcraft, challenging expectations of both the sounds a cello can create and how those sounds can conjure musicality.

Journey to the Cave of Guanyin is the Room40 follow up to Harbors, her stunning 2020 collaboration with Ellen Furman, and indeed, it’s a journey. Wong shines here as both composer and performer, building a captivating sound-world from layers of multitracked acoustic cello, principally tuned in just intonation. Based around a narrative of a solitary figure returning from sea to offer prayer to Guanyin, the Chinese folk deity of compassion and mercy, the album feels at once transcendent and firmly rooted to the sensuous earth. 

The curtains part for the overture of “Sea Eating Sun,” which holds the vibrations of a single note up to the light before it prisms into a majestic and gently powerful multitone drone. The story then begins in earnest with “A Ritual Begins,” as quivering low plucked notes colour a murky negative space like ink droplets in milk, before “Light in the Grotto” lets loose a collage of precise and elastic collisions of bow against string. Later, Wong dramatically lowers the tuning to explore “the pure growl of the slackened string,” and indeed there’s a guttural, animalistic energy to the stunning dronescape of “Prayer to Avalokiteśvara.”

While some of these tracks may be strong enough to stand alone as individual pieces, on the whole they’re best understood in relation to one another, as a single complete work. It’s a studied and technically astute collection which demands a focused listen, yet the songs presented feel far less like academic études than reverent exaltations of the textural and harmonic potentialities of the instrument. As such, it makes for a thrilling voyage. (Graham Latham)