When Classical Music Meets Surfing: "Sounds and Swells" at the San Diego Public Library April 15

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 15) I went to the San Diego Public Library for an unusual, to say the least, event called Sounds and Swells, which combined live string quartet music by the Hausmann Quartet (whom my husband Charles and I had seen earlier just before Easter performing Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross at Verbatim Books with interspersed readings by local writers) with surfing films. The Hausmann Quartet’s Web site explained the program thusly: “Join us for the return of Sounds and Swells! As part of this season’s San Diego Central Library Cinema & Sounds series, this collaboration between the Hausmann Quartet and Art of Elan at the Library’s Neil Morgan Auditorium features live music by Claude Debussy, Terry Riley, Franz Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Schubert accompanying local surfing footage from McCracken Films and Joey Taylor Photography. This concert is free and open to the public.” Art of Elan is a local nonprofit that describes its mission as follows: “Known for its collaborative spirit, Art of Elan has been pioneering unique events and bringing exciting classical music to diverse audiences for over 16 years through innovative partnerships and bi-national initiatives that have cultivated curious audiences on both sides of the border.” The concert was curated (whatever that means in this context; I’m guessing he selected both the film clips and the live pieces that accompanied them) by Dr. Eric Starr, a tall, rail-thin man who’s boyishly handsome even though he’s also visibly getting on in years. He looks like an aging surfer who still likes to hang out at the beach even though he probably doesn’t do much surfing anymore. Dr. Starr is listed on the San Diego State University Web site as “Studio Artist Teacher of Trombone and Euphonium; Lecturer of Music: Brass Chamber Music Program Advisor – Music, Entrepreneurship and Business Degree, Brass Area Coordinator, Internship Coordinator,” a quite impressive set of credentials.

The program featured professionally shot footage of 10 surfing sites around the world (though the clips were grouped into just six segments) accompanied by the Hausmann Quartet’s performances of music by Claude Debussy, Terry Riley, Franz Josef Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, Lou Harrison and Franz Schubert. The surfing footage was mostly quite good and showed the amazing skill of the surfers involved as they were seen mostly “shooting the curl” – surfing under the crest of a breaking wave. The opening sequence, shot at Teahupo’o, Tahiti, was quite the best; set to the last movement (“Trés moderé; trés animé”) of Debussy’s String Quartet, Op. 10, it featured spectacular footage of excellent surfers, some of it in real time and some in slow motion. It was a bit disorienting to watch surfing footage without actually hearing the sounds of surf, but I soon got used to it after a while and the combination of the surfing and the music assumed a kind of balletic grace. Next came a predictably gloomier segment headlined “Alaska and Norway,” shot in the dead of winter where daylight is only an hour and a half long (the titles helpfully explained to us that sunrise in that part of the world begins at 10 a.m. and sunset is at 11:30 a.m.). The filmmakers, whoever they were (only the San Diego and Half Moon Bay sequences had any onscreen credits either to the people who shot them or the ones who appeared), managed to grab all their shots during the 1 ½-hour time window, and the music, Terry Riley’s “‘G’ Song,” provided an appropriately dark and doleful accompaniment. Next came the comic-relief segment of the program, so to speak: “The Wedge” at Newport Beach, California, a set of short, choppy waves virtually nobody seemed to be able to surf without wiping out. Set to two “Presto” finales of quartets by Franz Josef Haydn (Op. 9, no. 3; and Op. 33, no. 2), this footage evoked quite a lot of audience laughter. In fact, the Op. 33, no. 2 finale had one of Haydn’s notorious trick endings in which the audience started applauding after one of the long pauses in the finale – and then the quartet came back for two notes more.

After that came the local footage, photographed by McCracken Films and Joey Taylor Photography; reportedly McCracken and Taylor were in the audience last night and the beginning announcement made it sound like they were going to do a question-and-answer session at the end of the program, but they didn’t. It helped that the locations where this footage was shot – La Jolla, Ocean Beach (only briefly) and Sunset Cliffs off Point Loma – were familiar to me, including some brief spots of surfers slaloming around the columns that hold up the Ocean Beach Pier. Not only is this sort of surfing incredibly dangerous (you can easily hurt or even kill yourself by crashing into the pilings that hold up the pier), the Ocean Beach Pier itself is currently closed to visitors. So far the city of San Diego is holding hearings on what to do about it and whether to try to fix it or tear it down altogether and build heaven knows what to replace it (probably some kind of “multi-use development” with tacky retail on the ground floor and towers of expensive housing above). This gives the footage important historic value, at least! The local footage was accompanied by the last “Presto” movement of the Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, by Mendelssohn. Next came one of the most interesting segments, though I wasn’t able to take notes on the various people credited; it seemed like the filmmaker was either Dave or Dan Healy and he seemed to be out to give each of the surfers on-screen credits, too, as they first appeared. It was called “Mavericks One” and took place at Half Moon Bay, California (though the only film listed on imdb.com even remotely close to that title is something called Sea Rising: Mavericks, written and directed by James Nguyen and scheduled for release in 2025), and though not all the surfers in it were able to surf their waves to completion, enough of them did it was a welcome relief after all the wipeouts in the Newport Beach sequence.

The program ended with some more creative geography, footage that mashed up the Banzai Pipeline in Oahu, Hawai’i with Skeleton Bay in Namibia, of all places. It was nice to see some footage of Hawai’i, where after all surfing was invented (in the early 1920’s by lifeguards not as sport or entertainment, but as a way to get people they’d rescued from drowning back to dry land as soon as possible), but the cutbacks between Hawai’i and Namibia were confusing, at least partly because aside from one Black man, all the spectators seemed to be white. The accompaniment was the “Presto” movement from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet (so called because he based it on a song called “Death and the Maiden” Schubert had written earlier) and it worked pretty well, creating a nicely somber mood despite the ultra-fast movement title. All in all, Sounds and Swells was a quite nice evening, expertly bringing together two sorts of art – classical music and scenes of surfing – into an engaging whole even though it wasn’t quite the sum of its parts. One wonders why the music didn’t have more to do with the ocean: the piece I’d like to have heard is Debussy’s La Mer, probably the most famous piece of classical “surf music” ever written; it’s for a full orchestra but I’m guessing there’s an arrangement out there for string quartet, and if there isn’t the Hausmanns could probably make one!