23 February 2011
Finding Room to Tune Into the New
by Christian B. Carey
NEW YORK – Concerts in the Park Avenue Armory have been a small part of its history all along, but in 2007, the venue re-committed itself to being a performance space, and 2010-'11 was its first full artistic season. Appointed with a number of platforms and balconies and an 85-foot-high vaulted ceiling, the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall provides myriad opportunities for ambitious stagings. Its acoustics are extraordinary: a listener is instantly struck by the clarity and incisiveness of musical sounds from any range, be they instruments or voices. It was a near ideal environment for the contemporary programming of the Feb. 17-20 Tune-In Music Festival, and proved a winning formula for drawing a crowd -- most of the events were sold out.
The festival opened with the premiere of the hyper-programmatic "Arco," an Armory commission for bass-baritone Charles Perry Sprawls, vocal quartet New York Polyphony and Sympho Orchestra. A collaboration among composers Paul Haas, Paul Fowler and Bora Yoon, "Arco" also contains excerpts and short works by others, including Latin chant and polyphonic settings by William Byrd, the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 and Arvo Pärt's "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten." Divided into some 20 sections, the material is apparently designed to coalesce into a "modern day creation myth." Listeners were (helpfully) provided with a chart indicating where each composer's work entered and exited. "Arco" doesn't deliver on the lofty ambitions as expressed in its copious program note, nor does it cohere into a well-integrated work. However, it does occasionally show off the Armory's potential as a music venue. It was thrilling to hear New York Polyphony's incandescent singing waft down from some 70 feet above and the antiphonal deployments of Sympho's wind and brass. Indeed, the work's primary asset is its imaginative use of the space. Otherwise, Haas's music has an underwhelming cinematic quality, while Fowler's is overwrought and bombastic. Yoon's is the most interesting, combining laptop electronica, Tibetan singing bowls and her own vocals. Sadly, much of this was overamplified -- quite unnecessary in such an acoustically generous space.
The remaining concerts, curated by new-music ensemble eighth blackbird, embraced a stylistically catholic programming ethos that incorporated European post-modernism, the latest Downtown indie classical fare and a watershed minimalist work from the 1970s. Each program was designed to reflect differently on a famous Stravinsky statement, "Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything." Friday evening, entitled "powerLESS," seemed in agreement with Stravinsky, offering Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas's "In Vain" (2000). Performed by the Argento Chamber Ensemble, the hourlong work, with extended passages in complete darkness (with not even an exit sign in view) combines two of Haas's abiding compositional concerns: an incorporation of microtones and an inexorable kind of repetition. Its densely constructed passages are often recycled, slowly evolving into differently orchestrated manifestations but never providing a sense of closure or resolution.
"In Vain" explores a wide dynamic range. Whispering string tremolos and delicate sustained chords are interrupted by yawping cluster chords in the brass and keening fortissimo woodwinds. During the moments of darkness, interrupted by an occasional burst from strobe lights, the sounds take on a haunting ambiance. Unconventional timbres and the lack of visual cues show a flair for the dramatic and lend an element of mystery. Steven Schick is best known as a virtuoso percussionist and conductor of new music; he was recently appointed music director of the San Francisco Contemporary Players. In recent years he's also been active in the vocalist/spoken- word milieu. Collaborating with videographer Ross Karre and sound designer Sharokh Yadegari, Schick has fashioned the text of Kurt Schwitters' sound poem "UrSonate" (1922-32) into a half-hour-long performance piece. One part raconteur riffs on Dada-esque syllables, one part musically designed avant-electronica collage, he has brought out both the absurdist whimsy and sonata-like structural principals of Schwitters' work.
Overlapping images of Schick interact with his live performance, often in canon, creating powerful crescendos and eventual fortissimo pile-ups. As with the treatment of Yoon's piece on Wednesday, one wished here that Yadegari had trusted the resonance of the space more and relied less on amplification, which at times grew to assaultive levels. Elsewhere, overtone singing and mouth noises helped to create a varied palette in accord with the vivid images on display. Schick's rendition of "Ursonate" is extraordinarily rich and entertaining. "PowerLESS" concluded with a set that coupled Matt Albert's chamber-ensemble arrangement of Bach's Chaconne from Partita in D-minor with Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" (1976). The solo violin piece is orchestrated with the same forces as the Reich -- clarinets, strings, a quartet of female vocalists, four pianos and a great deal of pitched percussion. The two works were played without pause by an all-star lineup of contemporary performers: vocalists Mellissa Hughes, Kamala Sankaram, Nina Faia and Abby Fischer; clarinetist Josh Rubin; pianists Lisa Moore and Blair McMillen; members of the percussion ensemble red fish blue fish, and eighth blackbird. Albert's arrangement points up the contrapuntal character of all of Bach's music, even works that are originally written for a solo instrument. It begins with the deconstruction of the violin part into a compound melody, on percussion. Elsewhere, it seems to share an affinity with the "embedded chorale" hypothesis, in which voices -- and later winds and strings -- bring out four-part textures resembling chorale passages. At the same time, pitched percussion lends the work undulating pulsations that are the motor for ostinatos not dissimilar to the minimalist machinations of the Reich work that followed.
"Music for 18 Musicians" (here played by 19 -- the composer only specifies the minimum number) is one of the iconic works of the minimalist canon. Now 35 years on, it has endured well, although the presence of scat-inflected vocalises, while charming, lends a relative sense of the era. Built on a cycle of 11 chords, which are heard in sequence only at the very beginning and end of the piece, its driving ostinato is shared at various times by pianos, marimbas, xylophones and maracas. Each section, lasting five or so minutes, stretches out a single pulsating chord, with the vibraphone's periodic entrances delineating the sections, helping to articulate the form and direct the musicians through this process-based piece. Despite the focus on a single chord for minutes at a time, the number of shifts in the work's orchestration is extraordinary. This is especially apparent in live performance, since many players are required to do "double duty," moving from one instrument to another. Here they began a bit tentatively, but quickly built a sense of ecstatic ensemble synergy. And although the hour-long work capped a concert that approached marathon length -- clocking in at nearly four hours -- it seemed to energize rather than exhaust the audience. Indeed, the festival as a whole suggests that new music, even programs that demand a great deal from listeners, can be vibrant and rewarding. Here's hoping that Tuned-In returns next year, but with the amps turned down so audiences can hear the Armory's glorious acoustics au naturel.
Copyright © 2011, Musical America
