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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
June 5, 2005
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By Jonathan Russell
The last day of the Berkeley Edge Fest on Sunday juxtaposed contemporary music from the east and west coasts. The afternoon concert, at UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall, featured music of John Zorn, long the exemplar of New York's gritty “downtown” scene, while the evening concert, also at Hertz, presented the music of UC Berkeley professor Jorge Liderman and several recent Berkeley graduates, performed by the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players, music that, on the whole, was far lighter and airier.
John Zorn first became known for his wild, post-modern juxtapositions of different styles. Ten seconds of avant-garde screeching might be followed by twenty seconds of cool jazz, a few seconds of punk rock, a rock ballad, a Mozart quote, all in quick succession, no transition, no attempt to make it all cohere. It is music that is visceral, exciting, confusing — and often hilarious. No composer has made me laugh more than John Zorn has.
But Sunday's pieces represented a more recent line of work, a more serious, more personal, more coherent style. The first piece on the program was nine selections from Masada Book Two – The Book of Angels performed by Mark Feldman on violin and Sylvie Corvoisier on piano. Masada is one in a series of recent works in which Zorn explores his Jewish heritage. The piece fuses modes and melodic ideas from traditional Jewish klezmer music with jazz and modern classical techniques – but unlike his earlier pastiche pieces, this is a real union rather than a juxtaposition.
There are still sudden shifts, but it all feels like part of the same style. And the form of most of the pieces seems to be jazz song form, with the head coming back after improvised parts. It makes a huge difference to hear these sudden shifts a second or third time; what might seem crazy and incoherent on a first hearing becomes familiar and intentional when it is repeated as a whole unit. In the second selection, Zorn quotes Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, but it is harmonized dissonantly, making it fit with its surroundings and making it more haunting than humorous. This is emblematic of how Zorn uses quotations throughout the piece.
This is not to say that the piece is contained and proper, or that Zorn has become a respectable member of the musical bourgeoisie. There are still wild moments and lots of improvisation, which Feldman and Courvoiser performed with great intensity, virtuosity, and wild abandon, inspiring the audience to ignore the lame classical music taboo against applauding between movements. In Masada, Zorn seems to have grown up a bit but, thankfully, not too much. He maintains the visceral, wild energy that I've always liked best about his music, but has made it deeper, more serious, more profound. The string quartet, Necronomicon, which made up the second half of the concert, moved even farther in the direction of typical modern concert music. If I didn't know it was by John Zorn, I would have guessed a modernist following in the footsteps of Webern. The piece is gestural and textural, and on the whole well-paced and engaging, though perhaps a bit too long. Zorn successfully writes an effective piece in this modernist style, but what it has to say is far less original, inventive or personal than Masada. The Crowley Quartet – Jennifer Choi and Jesse Mills on violin, Richard O'Neill on viola, and Fred Sherry on cello – performed with intensity and conviction. Once again, I was happy to see the audience applauding between movements, with Fred Sherry, a long-time veteran of the New York new music scene, urging them on delightedly. The highlights of the evening concert were the first two pieces, by Reynold Tharp: Cold for vibraphone and piano, and Mountains and Seas for percussion and piano, both performed by Michael Orland on piano and Chris Froh on percussion. Cold starts off with a very soft minor third tremolo on the vibes, which sets the tone of the piece and recurs several times throughout. The piece is an exploration of icy tone colors, full of deep, arctic resonances. Mountains and Seas features some similar vibe-piano colors, but also introduces the woodblock, glockenspiel, and tubular bells, and has much more rhythmic drive and kinetic energy. It displays a great joyousness in resonance and the pure sensation of vibrating, pulsating sound. Of all the pieces on the concert, it was the most visceral and alive.
Adriana Verdie Vas-Romero's Flute 3.2.4 for solo flute, performed by Tod Brody, was delightful. The first movement starts with just a minor third, which expands out and grows into an exciting, energetic movement. A more lyrical movement follows, and then a dancing, colorful, Ravel-esque third movement. Fernando Benadon's In 3 two was pleasant, but un-engaging. Benadon's instrumentation, with Terri Baune on violin, Thalia Moore on cello, and Carey Bell on bass clarinet, worked against him in the first movement, in which his attempt to write balanced chorale textures was foiled by the rich timbre of the bass clarinet. The second movement attempted to be energetic and playful, but felt too studied. It could perhaps have been saved by a more inspired performance, with more energy and oomph in the jaunty rhythms. Keeril Makan's Voice within Voice for solo baritone saxophone, performed by Brian Sacawa, is not really a composition but a catalog of the cool sounds you can get from using your voice in a baritone saxophone in different ways. And yes, some of these sounds are awfully cool. But I hope that Makan will now go back and actually do something with these sounds. Perhaps in the ‘50s and ‘60s it was enough simply to experiment and find out all the sounds you can get out of an instrument; but that's all been done now. What's really interesting now is what a composer can do with these discoveries. I also found myself irritated by the seriousness with which this whole enterprise seemed to be taken. Some of these sounds are just really silly sounding and I wanted to laugh, but the vibe of the performer and the audience was clearly not to laugh but to take this all very seriously. Quite a contrast to the vibe at the John Zorn concert earlier that day. Jorge Liderman's Faster..., with Thalia Moore on cello, Russell Greenberg on Percussion, and Karen Rosenak on piano, was friendly and harmless but dull. It was further hindered by a rather tepid performance and the diffuse acoustic of Hertz hall which seemed to dull the intensity of the colors. The concert closer, Liderman's Flautando for flute (Tod Brody) and chamber ensemble, was more successful, with spiky Stravinsky-esque rhythms, and bright, colorful instrumentation. David Milnes' energetically focused conducting infused the ensemble with the punch that had been missing in some of the other performances. Still, in the end the piece felt too sweet and sugary, much like how California still often feels to this transplant from the East Coast – open, pleasant, and friendly, but lacking a solid core, as if it might all just float away into the mist.
(Jonathan Russell is a Professor of Musicianship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and an editor with PBA Music Publishing. He is active in the bay area as a clarinetist, bass clarinetist, and composer.)
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John Zorn
Jorge Liderman
Fernando Benadon
