Washington Classical Review

Vibraphonists Richard Putz, Aiyun Huang and Brian Graiser performed music of Stuart Saunders Smith Wednesday night at UMBC’s Linehan Hall. Photo: Jeremy Keaton

An hour and a half of atonal vibraphone music is about as esoteric a niche as music gets, unless it’s an hour and a half of atonal vibraphone music without an intermission. 

In this case, the music was almost secondary to the event, the first concert of a five-day festival of vibraphone music by Stuart Saunders Smith, which opened Wednesday night at Linehan Hall.

Saunders Smith, who passed away in 2024, was a longtime faculty member of University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Over the course of five days, the UMBC music department is performing five concerts of his vibraphone music, a massive offering entitled “The Night Suite.” Mr. Smith no doubt did much in his lifetime to deserve such a handsome tribute.

Before the music began, Mr. Smith’s wife quoted him as saying that his vibraphone music was a window into his soul. Saunders called himself a composer in the New England tradition, but the evening’s program of 34 short pieces seemed to reveal a musician with a passion for Webern’s brevity, Morton Feldman’s quietude, Boulez’s harmonic severity, Lou Harrison’s pan-Asian musical tastes, and the technicolor ping of the Javanese gamelan. If one could compare its totality to any piece at all, it would be the giant two-piano collection of miniatures,  Játékok, by György Kurtág.

The individual 34 pieces, all coming from different stages of Smith’s lifetime, were almost completely atonal. By the standards of modern classical percussion music, the rhythms were not severely complicated, but the melodic and harmonic language defined severity. One would call it a thicket of density but the textures were actually quite spare. One came away amazed that an instrument as seemingly light as the vibraphone was put to usage of such gravity.

The three vibraphonists, Aiyun Huang, Richard Putz and Brian Graiser, were extremely capable and no doubt worked enormously hard on these pieces as an act of extreme devotion to a beloved member of their community. All three were clearly virtuosos of their instrument, professionals for whom any composer would be lucky to write. Huang seemed to play with deliberate understatement, while Graiser played with wide dynamic range and striking clarity.

Richard Putz particularly elicited colors haunting past what one would ever ever think this limited instrument was capable of. In his hands the vibraphone had the delicacy of Radu Lupu on the piano, with pianissimos that seemed to brush the instrument like a harp. One heard not just intervals but overtones along with the overtones of the intervals intermingling with each other.

The opening event may have held limited appeal for the general concert-going public, with an audience heavy on music students and other performers at the festival. Still, as a tribute to a pillar of the UMBC music community, and for those who were there, one can be sure that it was a meaningful and moving evening.

“The Night Suite,” a festival of vibraphone music, continues through Sunday at UMBC. music.umbc.edu