San Francisco Classical Voice

The past decade-and-a-half has seen a number of events which have increased the connection between "classical" and popular musicians, rendering those distinctions meaningless in some circles. The Bang on a Can All-Stars, like the festival from which they are an offshoot, project hip populism, a style reminiscent of a club setting: casual dress, genial, low-key introductory remarks by composer/band member Evan Ziporyn, and dramatic general lighting. Even the ensemble's name seems to recall famous jazz bands, and the music they play engages with rock and other popular musics.

The featured event on their concert at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, on Wednesday, was a lucid and spectacularly musical performance of Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" (1978), a piece of "ambient music" that was transcribed and rescored by the Bang on a Can composers-- an effort that is quite a performance in and of itself. The idiosyncratic Eno doctors his instruments, so that realizing his original synthesized recording in real time required augmenting the six-member ensemble through electronic means. The seventh performer, who added voices, brass, winds and the Chinese pipa, was at the sound-mixing board.

Listening to this music live fundamentally alters not just the experience, but Eno's concept of the music's purpose. He produced his original recording with the idea that it was environmental music which might "color a space," in Ziporyn's words. Eno's liner notes end with the dictum, "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." But in the atmosphere of the theater, the music was never really ignorable and, in fact, there were some effects, like the scraping of a mallet on a metallic drum throughout the second movement, that were disruptive of calm. The vibrant presence of the sounds in the theater, the visual interest of the players cuing each other and listening intently, even the desire to know the arranger's secret art encouraged much more focused listening than we might otherwise give the piece.

Anticipating a mellower second half, the All-Stars programmed a more overtly theatrical and energetic opening, leading off with Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang's "Cheating, Lying, Stealing" (1996). Lang aims at a rock-based anti-aesthetic, so the piece is aggressive: a basic rhythmic idea shatters into heterophony and eventually becomes very primal, as a military tatoo on the snare drum is added in the last section. I'm not sure that this piece necessarily differentiates him from overly proud "classical composers" as he desires. Overheated populist rhetoric aside, his music is fairly clever and swaggering too.

Pamela Z's "The Schmetterling" (1998) was the unexpected jewel in the concert. She performs with an electronically sensitized body suit that translates her movements into audible sound through a MIDI synthesizer. Dance and theatrical gesture become intimately linked with music, and the work of performance integrates into the meaning of the piece. "The Schmetterling" tells the fanciful tale of a butterfly that gets sucked down into Pamela's lungs; for a singer, the nightmare takes on a metaphysical dimension, a quest to release the voice from a physical constraint. In turn, this brings forth extraordinary and fascinating vocalism from her operatic instrument while her hands and arms enacted the butterfly. The All-Stars provided musical support for this exciting and multivalent work.

Michael Gordon's "X/Y" (1998) is a percussion piece based on the idea of competing rhythms that become softer and louder in turn, a compositional device that allows a listener to hear the algebraic relationships between them. Combined with timbral distinctions between the drums, the piece gave the impression of being even more polyrhythmic than it was, like the effect of implied polyphony in a Bach Cello Suite. Steven Schick's performance was exhilarating and theatrical.

(Michael Zwiebach is a Ph.D. doctoral candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley.)

©1998 Michael Zwiebach, all rights reserved