I decided to trek along to this, the final New Music concert of the fall season at UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall on Monday night, presented by a group of students calling themselves the ECO Ensemble, on the recommendation of a friend and once my curiosity had been piqued by the prospect of a CNMAT alum or two doing some weird and crazy stuff. Weird and crazy I most certainly did not find, but this is not to say that the event was a disappointment. Far from it, in fact. All to often, technology and artistry make strange bedfellows that wake up next to each other the next morning thinking “er, what just happened?” I think in this case they made each other morning coffee.
The opening piece, “Archives” by composer Sivan Eldar, mixed a very spare score - somewhat like a dreamscape - with flowing footage of venerable conductors very much in the thick of interpreting their ‘own’ music (‘The Firebird’, amongst other things). The cellist and violinist physically present on stage responded intuitively to the novel environment and seemed to capture the essence of gesture flicked about by the conductors (including Rattle, MTT and others) in the video. Heavy delay and reverb on the instruments (although I was not much of a fan of the electric cello’s timbre) added to the ethereal tone that, coupled with the slowed down visuals, worked very nicely. Moreover, the performers spent a great deal of time looking at the screen as opposed to the score, which made me insanely happy. It was almost as though they were given a little time to crawl inside the internal world of the conductor, a figure often overlooked as more of a showman than a deeply engaged musician. This felt like a recognition on the part of the performers of the conductor’s role and connection to the music.
“Wet and wild” was my first thought at the opening of John McCallum’s piece, “Aberration”, and not in a bad way. The choice of instrumentation (an array of woodblocks on eggshells) was extremely effective in evoking a liquid world of portentious chaos. Shortly after the establishment of interlock came a giddy, goblin-like playfulness between the three percussionists, each with their own motivic bent that contributed to an undulating temporal effect of serious ‘phatness’. I had to feel sorry for the one guy without the headphones, although he certainly seemed to know what he was doing. There was a lovely sense of space toward the end of the piece, replete with the requisite hard thump of completion. The program mentioned ‘new software’ – if this was present it was not obvious and was nicely hidden away.
The next offering, “The Anticipation of Inspiration”, composed by Michael Nicholas and conducted by David Milnes, was somewhat of an anomaly for me, and the title ultimately felt quite fitting. Pierrot ensemble? Not quite. Noise band? Not so much. I liked the cello timbres – slaps and all. But really, not another dubiously thought-out piece for marimba! I wish more attention could be given to writing for this instrument – as it was, this simply felt like another post jazz-infused concoction that didn’t sit well. The brass was also a little ‘discrete’ for my liking, although I loved the trombonist twirling around in his seat (why pay through the nose for surround sound I say). Overall the sounds didn’t seem to blend particularly well, although I was moderately enthralled by a buildup of sound mass material that pushed the brass front and center – more of that and I might just be convinced.
Matthew Goodheart’s appropriately titled “For Clarinet and Solo Percussion’ has the kind of setup that lets you know that it’s better not to ask how it works. A Max/MSP patch was clearly in evidence, but apart from that he might just as well have been working for NASA. All I could see were three cymbals with wires coming out of them placed at the front of the stage. The fact that no-one bats an eyelid when the stage whines with glassy feedback lets you know you’re in the right place for a new music concert. Joining the shiny discs is shockingly talented clarinetist Matt Ingalls (of SF Sound fame). One hears almost from the outset the lyricism of Messaien mixed with some Klangfarbe a la Stockhausen. However the soundscape did teeter on the edge of sci-fi at times. Indeed, at one point I thought it was that bit in the film when the cow was trapped in the tractor beam (you know the one – where the aliens come down to take all our livestock). B-movie references aside, this background was blended masterfully with classy multiphonics by Ingalls, and reminded me of some of Bruno Mantovani’s more IRCAMesque work.
So, here I was, gamely critiquing this impressive piece of work, when the composer jumps up and tells the audience that the Max patch had broken somewhere 2/3 of the way through what we had been listening to. OK. So, what now? Well, play the whole thing again, after about 10 minutes of ‘recalibrating’ of course. Anyone who’s familiar with the perils of live electronics knows that experimental music is so called because it must be allowed to fail. But the recovery was nothing short of magnificent. The scraping cymbals toward the end were utterly visceral and rhythmically compelling. A piece so good they had to play it twice.
Finally, we hear Rama Gottfried’s “One Loop For Nine”, conducted by David Milnes. Apparently, this work was originally based on an array of music boxes driven by 200 meters of hole-punched music being played through them, so here we have a reinterpretation for live ensemble. I was struck immediately by the supremely interesting timbres being thrown out by the highly talented ensemble. There was a good instrumental balance that works together but also favors imperfection, so common in household toys of a certain time. A few highlights for me were the pianist’s use of both piano keys, piano strings and the toy piano to one side, and also the beautiful trilling and flutter-tonguing of the piccolo, giving a shimmer to the dust and decay of the piece. Indeed, the whole ensemble was constantly scratching, urgently moving on to the next strip of the holepunched paper being fed through them, but there was enough repetition to keep it interesting. There were a large number of ‘small sounds’ in this piece – ping-pong balls being dropped, sheets of paper being hit, strumming the strings of the piano, all giving a fantastic impression of a miniature orchestra or the kind of band you might encounter at a flea circus, all chafing and stretching. The soundscape was one of a plethora of tiny mechanical devices, but the sax adds a nice warm sonority on occasion to counterbalance the ant farm of musical scurrying. How far this was an exact reconstruction of the original installation is unknown, but it worked.
On the whole, this was an excellent example of why people should listen to ‘New Music’ right now. Maybe it’s getting to the point of convergence of technique, art and contextual understanding where this could just be a normal concert instead of some cloistered academic happening.
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