17 October 2011
SONiC: New Music from the New Generation
by Zachary Woolfe
NEW YORK – Rarely has this city’s vibrant new-music scene produced an endeavor as ambitious as SONiC: Sounds of a Century, a new festival that opened Oct. 14 and continues at ten different venues all across the city over the next week. Produced by the American Composers Orchestra and Columbia University’s Alice M. Ditson Fund, co-curated by composer Derek Bermel and pianist Stephen Gosling, it features six ensembles performing exclusively 21st-century works by over 100 composers from six continents, all under the age of 40.
Despite substantial advance publicity, the crowd Oct. 15 at the Miller Theater was oddly small for a performance by eighth blackbird, an ensemble known for its creative, cohesive programs. At last year’s Tune-In Festival at the Park Avenue Armory, the group gave an excellent, influential series of concerts on the theme of “Powerful/Less,” weighing the validity of Stravinsky’s famous formulation that music is powerless to express anything (i.e., political messages).
Perhaps that series was still in the mind and ear, but politics—in its largest sense: relationships of power—seemed the undercurrent of Saturday’s concert, too. Fabian Svensson’s “Two Sides,” composed for the Italian sextet Sentieri Selvaggi, was in fact premiered at a concert whose theme was “the right to dissent.”
“Deeming it impossible to write a piece about as abstract a concept as that of the right to something,” Svensson notes in the program, “I decided instead to portray the actual concept of dissent.” He divides the musicians into two groups, one playing high-register instruments (piccolo, violin and xylophone) and the other low-register (bass clarinet, piano, cello). The two groups enter from opposite sides of the stage and take turns burbling happily until they begin playing together, interweaving in increasing chaos. The players leave, one by one, until all that’s left is the piano and piccolo in angry bursts of dialogue at the extremes of their respective ranges.
It was hard to hear the piece and not think about our own national politics, seemingly free these days from the possibility of compromise between extremes. Svensson’s work has an edge of optimism -- the “dissent” between the groups is based on their playing by the same fundamental rules -- and a pessimism: after all, the piece depends on the perpetual restatement and development of disagreement, rather than on the possibility of resolution. Paradoxically, representing dissent in performance requires utter unity and crisp ensemble between the two “opposing” sides, and eighth blackbird was admirably, characteristically tight. Such was the case throughout the concert, especially on the closing piece, Bruno Mantovani’s Chamber Concerto No. 2 for sextet, whose dazzling flourishes the group finessed as one.
There were other explorations of opposition and unity. Mayke Nas’s “DiGiT #2” for piano four hands had the two players (Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duvall) falling on the keys in hilariously synchronized motions, gradually increasing in rhythmic complexity as a paddy-cake game found its way into the percussive piano playing. It was like a vision of happy couplehood. Timothy Andres’ “Crashing Through Fences” takes two of the highest-register instruments -- piccolo and glockenspiel -- and gives them a relationship: a lilting shared melody punctuated with violent beats of the bass drum that each player operates with a foot pedal.
Amy Beth Kirsten’s “Pirouette” for solo flute is part of a larger work she is writing for eighth blackbird, based on the classic characters of the commedia dell’arte tradition. In this section, Tim Munro, the ensemble’s tall, lanky, wild-haired flutist, is cast as Harlequin. There is little that’s conventionally charming about the character or the piece, which is its strength. Munro repeatedly prepares to play, each time stopping at the last second and muttering, “What? What?” and giggling. Gradually the sentence “What you see can’t be seen” emerges in a virtuosic combination of speaking, playing and exaggerated breaths; its eerily dissonant style nods to Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire.”
Like Kirsten’s piece, Dan Visconti’s smart, fun quartet “Fractured Jams” (which gave the concert its title) for clarinet (Michael J. Maccaferri), violin (Yvonne Lam), cello (Nicholas Photinos) and piano (Kaplan) also revolved, like a musician’s nightmare, around being unable to play. The first movement portrayed a kind of rock band sitting around the garage, too nervous to start rehearsing, and the rest of the movements had the same quality of intentional tentativeness, oddly sweet and endearing. At one point, Lam brilliantly mimicked the long, high drone of amplifier feedback; the final movement is a high-spirited rag that ended only when Kaplan slammed the keyboard lid shut.
A respite from politics and power, uncertainty and tentativeness, came in Caleb Burhans’ “Lullaby for Madeline” for solo marimba. Played by Mathew Duvall with exquisite control, it begins with a gently quivering melody that gradually calms. Written for one of Burnhans’ colleagues to play for his firstborn daughter, the piece, like the others on the concert, draws its inspiration from a relationship – the loveliest one of the program.
