Concert review: Other Minds Festival
Feb. 25th, 2005 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSo since I was going to be in the City on Thursday anyway, I figured I'd disappear for a couple hours to attend the first concert of this festival, a forum for "cutting-edge" and "innovative" composers. This concert attracted me because it featured Michael Nyman, the man who first applied the term "minimalism" to music. He's a favorite of mine and I'd never seen him in person. He played some selections from his film music for The Piano on the instrument of the same name, which in context sounded like Windham Hill environment music, and (with considerable electronic enhancement) a score for a short silent film from 1921 depicting a day in Manhattan.
Two other pieces by Nyman were performed by the Del Sol String Quartet, who tried gamely but were just too relaxed and go-with-the-flow to face up to the iron discipline and rigid ensemble demanded by Nyman's Third Quartet, and that's the easy one of his quartets. This was miscasting to the point of embarrassment.
Following which they were joined by soprano Cheryl Keller who unintelligibly sang the words of "The Ballad of Katriot Rexhepi", the tale of an infant refugee of the Kosovo war. Nyman wrote this music as an accompaniment not for a film, but for a visual art installation (not present at the concert) made entirely of dryer lint. Dryer lint. Ohhh-kay. (Here's a rave review of the lint.)
If I was there for Nyman, whose work took up the second half of the concert, more of the audience seemed to be there for Daniel Bernard Roumain in the first half, as half of the people in my row vanished at intermission after his work. The Del Sol Quartet seemed a lot happier playing Roumain's Fourth Quartet, a partly improvisatory, rather relaxed work in consonant breathing phrases, sort of like the unaustere cousin of Morton Feldman, accompanied in part by recordings of the spoken voice of Maya Angelou and by Roumain himself, making interesting sounds by bouncing his bow off the strings of an electric violin. A pre-recorded backbeat incongruously joined in for a few moments.
Some of the audience seemed more nervous at the prospect of the opening work by Phill Niblock, because the introducer warned us that it would be very loud. Niblock's work uses multi-tracking to set up "sound masses" intended to send overtones and interference waves throbbing throughout the listeners' entire bodies: for which purpose the louder the better. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as this sounds: rather hypnotic, in fact. This is the kind of music that doesn't do anything, it just sits there and is: it's more like an abstract painting in sound than like what one normally thinks of as music. Still, I kept fingers pressed against my ears for the entire thing, which set up a counterpoint between the music and the sound of my breathing, and after the piece ended I noticed the sole performer, electric guitarist Seth Josel, removing earplugs.
The concert was held at the Yerba Buena Center, a newish hall tucked into a corner at Moscone Center, full of metal pipes and looking like a factory. Aesthetically it couldn't possibly be more inappropriate for the local Gilbert and Sullivan society, who perform there (as a result of which I never go see them any more), but it fits music like this pretty well.
Two other pieces by Nyman were performed by the Del Sol String Quartet, who tried gamely but were just too relaxed and go-with-the-flow to face up to the iron discipline and rigid ensemble demanded by Nyman's Third Quartet, and that's the easy one of his quartets. This was miscasting to the point of embarrassment.
Following which they were joined by soprano Cheryl Keller who unintelligibly sang the words of "The Ballad of Katriot Rexhepi", the tale of an infant refugee of the Kosovo war. Nyman wrote this music as an accompaniment not for a film, but for a visual art installation (not present at the concert) made entirely of dryer lint. Dryer lint. Ohhh-kay. (Here's a rave review of the lint.)
If I was there for Nyman, whose work took up the second half of the concert, more of the audience seemed to be there for Daniel Bernard Roumain in the first half, as half of the people in my row vanished at intermission after his work. The Del Sol Quartet seemed a lot happier playing Roumain's Fourth Quartet, a partly improvisatory, rather relaxed work in consonant breathing phrases, sort of like the unaustere cousin of Morton Feldman, accompanied in part by recordings of the spoken voice of Maya Angelou and by Roumain himself, making interesting sounds by bouncing his bow off the strings of an electric violin. A pre-recorded backbeat incongruously joined in for a few moments.
Some of the audience seemed more nervous at the prospect of the opening work by Phill Niblock, because the introducer warned us that it would be very loud. Niblock's work uses multi-tracking to set up "sound masses" intended to send overtones and interference waves throbbing throughout the listeners' entire bodies: for which purpose the louder the better. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as this sounds: rather hypnotic, in fact. This is the kind of music that doesn't do anything, it just sits there and is: it's more like an abstract painting in sound than like what one normally thinks of as music. Still, I kept fingers pressed against my ears for the entire thing, which set up a counterpoint between the music and the sound of my breathing, and after the piece ended I noticed the sole performer, electric guitarist Seth Josel, removing earplugs.
The concert was held at the Yerba Buena Center, a newish hall tucked into a corner at Moscone Center, full of metal pipes and looking like a factory. Aesthetically it couldn't possibly be more inappropriate for the local Gilbert and Sullivan society, who perform there (as a result of which I never go see them any more), but it fits music like this pretty well.
