Bright in the Dead of the Night

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Eighth blackbird’s concert on Saturday defied elementary arithmetic. For example, the program featured two pieces, but four composers, which might seem twice as many composers as was required. Similarly, the first piece specified 12 musicians, but was performed by only six, which might seem twice too few.

Yet strange arithmetical — not to mention musical — feats can happen when the performing ensemble is a sextet with the ordinal “eighth” in its name: eighth blackbird, an accomplished new-music ensemble whose members play flute, clarinet, violin/viola, cello, piano, and percussion. The electrifying concert at Herbst Theatre was eighth blackbird’s third for San Francisco Performances.

eighth blackbird

Steve Reich composed the first piece on the program, which eighth blackbird commissioned. The group recently premiered Reich’s Double Sextet (2007) at the University of Richmond, where the ensemble is in residence. Reich’s work can be performed with 12 live musicians, although eighth blackbird performs it with six players set against a prerecorded version of themselves.

The piece is a thick tapestry of mind-boggling rhythmic and contrapuntal complexity, encompassing two fast, outer movements, and one slow inner one. The outer movements share similar, energetic rhythmic patterns. So, just as the live and recorded instrumental forces sound like temporally displaced mirror images of each other, the structure of the piece also seems to reflect back on itself.

Moving With the Music

Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolf collaboratively composed the second piece, singing in the dead of the night. The three composers are accustomed to working together, having cofounded Bang on a Can, an organization that variously creates and performs new music, and like eighth blackbird, aims to excite broad audiences about new music.

Lang, who recently won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for music, composed the outer movements for singing in the dead of night (2007). Like Gordon and Wolfe, Lang also composed an inner movement. Combined, the piece spans five movements. All of the composers gave eighth blackbird plenty of wiggle room: They asked for the ensemble to integrate onstage movement into the piece. In fact, the composers wanted the performers to make movement seem necessary to the music, rather than auxiliary. This integration required the help of Susan Marshall, a choreographer and stage director, as well as sound, lighting, and costume engineers.

One memorable example of Marshall’s choreography was seen in Lang’s slow middle movement, titled “these broken wings.” Alongside his score of sustained notes superimposed on one another, Lang also provided the performers with the vague instruction to drop things.

The suggestion produced some uncomfortably comical results. The performers saddled clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri with metal rods and pails, which were filled with still more metal objects. As he stood center stage with this armful of metal piled past his head, it was obvious he would ineluctably drop it. He did so, piece by piece. Each time, the electronically amplified crash rudely disturbed the plaintively sustained notes emanating from his colleagues.

In Wolfe’s movement, the stage effects took a darker turn. The players spilled sand across a table, and then amplified the sounds they made by spreading the sand with their bodies. To my eye, with the electronics and the sand producing a composite sound chillingly close to an ocean’s surf, the performers’ movements eerily began to resemble those of bloated, floating corpses.

In contrast, Gordon’s interior movement, titled “the light of the dark,” provided precisely that feeling of light. Performers grabbed nearby instruments, including an accordion and a harmonica, to simulate an improvisatory jam session. To heighten this blithe, lighthearted effect of improvisation, the group played largely from memory. All the players performed with such dexterity that it was easy to forget that the piece was neither improvised nor even remotely simple.

In short, like Double Sextet by Reich, singing in the dead of night is a delectably adept piece for this high-energy — and high-execution — sextet. In the real-world dead of the night, many musicians would sell their souls to perform concerts half as engaging as eighth blackbird’s.

Jessica Balik is a flutist and candidate for a doctorate in historical musicology at Stanford University.