I'm shortly off to Denmark for the WOMEX conference in Copenhagen.
WQXR has kindly invited me to blog about this year's event, the artists being presented, and one of my absolute favorite topics for bloviating: the fertile and fascinating crosscurrents of (Western) classical music and "world" music. I'll be posting over there starting tomorrow and continuing through Saturday.
Obviously, quite a few of these people rightfully belong in
multiple categories, but for the sake of expediency I’ve narrowed down their
wide-ranging brilliance into a single pigeonhole. (Sorry.)
Suggestions for others to add or corrections? (I am sure I've missed many, including people I know. Ah, memory...)
DM me
@anastasiat , or be super old-fashioned and just leave me a comment below. (I’m also considering adding a “fans”
section. What do you think?) Obviously, there’s a big emphasis on English
speakers and norteamericanos which I hope we can rectify.
Last night, So Percussion gave the debut of their new work Imaginary City at BAM as part of its now (and ironically enough) venerable "Next Wave" festival, now in its 27th season.
I am an unabashed admirer of this quartet, about whom I first wrote in 2005 for Billboard and whom I have profiled since. (At SXSW in 2008, for
example, I did a pre-concert discussion with them for the new music
evening--a first!--that Boosey & Hawkes presented, and for which Gramophone was the media partner.)
This new piece, which was inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, is an evening-long meditation on urban life. The marketing propaganda (seen in the clip above) says it's "illuminating the beauty of urban life," but I thought it dwells more on urban melancholy and the constant low-grade fever of city life.
The influence of such composers as Cage and Reich are indisputable in such elements as Reich-ian looped voices and Cage's objects put to a new use (desk lamps switching on and off, the sound of thick makers against a whiteboard-a great sound, by the way, when it's so muscularly articulated).
But whereas so much of Cage's work was putting a frame around a moment in time and inviting the audience in to explore it more deeply in all of its chance and deeply textured glory, Imaginary City is more about taking untraditional and traditional instruments and creating painterly and distilled portraits: the buzz of streetlights and the wan glow of headlights somehow suggested by the shimmering aura of a marimba, the metallic jingle of coins evoking the nature of work and money, the clatter of pipes and cans suggesting constant teardown and rebuilding, and (in the case of the video projection by Jennie Treuting) the entirely false urgency of a news zipper racing around the side of a building.
Some of the more theatrical elements of Imaginary City, which was directed by Rinde Eckert, worked beautifully (if kind of glibly). In one part of the piece, one of the percussionists, Adam Sliwinski, reads aloud in complete deadpan from the rules of Monopoly--yes, the board game. It's a very funny stroke of political commentary during our Great Recession: "A Banker who plays in the game must keep their personal funds separate from those of the Bank"; "The Bank never goes broke"; "If the Bank runs out of money, the Banker may issue as much as needed by writing on any ordinary paper."
What doesn't work? Among them, the Kabuki-esque friezes that Eckert puts the quartet in at the beginning of the piece (these guys dance with their instruments as a well-oiled, eight-limbed machine, but their discomfort in striking poses was nearly palpable); and the video projections, which were not nearly as sophisticated or nuanced as the music. Just as there is much in this piece that is sonically precise and yet site-unspecific--So's urban landscape could be any city--there are some irritatingly easy device, as when the musicians move small speakers around the state that hold the spoken voices of people describing their living situations ("I live with two roommates," "I live in the oldest house on the Upper West Side," and--ugh--ending with "I live in the moment.") Then there's the rather sophomoric audience participation bit at the conclusion (see below for more on that).
What works beautifully is the pure joy these virtuosos make in creating sound and in creating intricate and tightly coiled layers of sound that at times even brings to mind Renaissance choral music--if that' s not too odd a comparison--and the very real evocations of urban life they produce in all their multi-layered sonic glory.
Lawson White, a former So player himself, deserves real plaudits for his sound design work on this project--I'd hazard a guess that there were upwards of 100 (maybe more?) individual instruments onstage, with the musicians in constant motion all across the stage's breadth and depth. The sound was perfect.
A last note on the occasional perils of having a critic's seat along the aisle: in the section of the piece titled "I Love You"--which, underscored by the sounds of empty beer bottles rattling together, evokes nothing so much as the thin, drunken pre-dawn professions heard at any bar at last call--I was pulled from the audience as a quasi-soloist to bellow something at the stage. (I don't want to give anything away here.)
Given history, maybe I seemed like a plant, but Josh Quillen, a newer member of the group who plucked me out of darkened-theater obscurity, didn't know me. Maybe the critic's notebook in my lap was actually an unwitting challenge to the wall between critical observer and participant. But then again, I also clap at performances I like, in something of a breach of "traditional" critical protocol--ooh, daring, I know!--so why not jump in?
