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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
Nicole Paiement
March 10, 2007
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Comfortable in Its Own Skin By Aaron Einbond
In what ways can popularly inflected music fit in the "serious" concert hall? The New Music Ensemble of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music asked this question last Saturday in its program titled "Thick Skin." It was the last concert of the Conservatory's annual BluePrint new-music festival, capping its first season in the concert hall of the new San Francisco Conservatory, which recently relocated from the Sunset district to the Civic Center. Artistic Director Nicole Paiment ably led the large student group through a program that was both diverse and quirky.
The last shall come first: To close the evening and celebrate the new hall with its first dance performance, Lawrence Pech, a graduate of the Conservatory, danced his own choreography for Dupree’s Paradise, by Frank Zappa. The crossover composer's brand of "it's hip-to-be-square" music has traveled well, as evidenced by Pierre Boulez's request that Zappa arrange the work in 1984 for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, basing it on a riff from an earlier live-concert album. Zappa wrote for the classical "sinfonietta" ensemble solidly, if not adventurously, and the Conservatory players gave a spirited performance.
Most of the audience's attention was directed toward Pech, who impersonated an audience member in suit and tie who spontaneously rises to do a dance solo in the middle of watching a concert. He wove between the instrumentalists onstage and the audience in the hall, amusing everyone with his slapstick antics. The good humor fit the Zappa score well, reassuring us not to take either too seriously.
Another approach to popular influences came from Ryan Brown, also a Conservatory graduate, who was commissioned to write his work Thick Skin for the festival. The smaller ensemble used for that piece (which was performed without a conductor) distinguished itself immediately by playing while standing, as well as by wearing leather and plaid instead of concert black. The composer himself fronted on an electric guitar, and the band included electric bass, brasses, and most notably an amplified bassoon (possibly an ironic stand-in for saxophone). The genuine enthusiasm the group evoked was infectious, and plenty of middle-aged audience members bopped their heads along with the music.
Although it had some attractive moments, such as the brass coat-hangers strummed by the brass section during the slow movement (a metallic pun?), the work did not prove its worth in a concert hall setting. It might be more enjoyable in a less-formal venue. The guitars' oversaturated amplification did not translate well to the hall's resonant acoustics, with the result that they sometimes drowned out the brasses.
The 7/4 groove of the opening and the 3-against-4 accompaniment of the slow movement may have proven the composer's conservatory training, but more detail was desirable to command attention. (Too bad someone wasn't dancing.) While Brown's questioning of traditional concert structures is admirable, he and other young composers may find more convincing answers in the future.
Leave it to Luciano Berio to lead the way. His Euro-minimal masterpiece, Points on the Curve to Find ... (1974), must have been informed by repetitive American music he heard when teaching at Mills College in Oakland and elsewhere in the U.S. in the 1960s and '70s. But though the work winks at such influences, it still bears the unmistakable voice and modernist intensity of the composer himself. Unfortunately, the Conservatory's student ensemble was not quite up to the task, frequently burying the soloist, even at their quiet moments, yet lacking sufficient power in loud passages. Faculty pianist Mack McCray made a good effort at the grueling, perpetual-motion piano part but glazed over some details. An entirely different cross-cultural theme was proffered by the other two works on the program, by Chou Wen-Chung and Toru Takemitsu, two composers of Asian birth who work in a European medium. Takemitsu's Tree Line received the best performance of the evening; maybe its impressionistic temperament better suited the student players, who created deliciously eerie textures for bowed percussion, string harmonics, celeste, and harp. Interjected wind solos gave individual players a chance to shine, including a challenging oboe conclusion by Robert Scott. Hearing the Takemitsu and Berio works live was delightful, considering that their large instrumentations do not fit the budgets or priorities of most other Bay Area ensembles. Chou's approach to his Asian identity is more subtle than Takemitsu's, perhaps explaining the less-immediate popularity of his music, which nevertheless deserves a hearing. In Windswept Peaks (1989), a quartet is broken into jagged alternation between angular strings and pointillistic clarinet and piano. Ensemble Parallèle played the piece exquisitely. Jonathan Russell, whose clarinet work sounded ethereal, took advantage of the hall's live acoustic to enter in silence and exit the same way. The piece accumulates to a powerful tutti and then begins a long process of disintegration, concluding with a fast motion reminiscent of its opening. Although the abstract-expressionistic writing could be identified with Chou's career spent on the East Coast, it had echoes of traditional Chinese music in tiny string glissandi, wide vibrato, and both muted and plucked piano. The composer provides a role model of how to integrate a multicultural background into expressive and thoughtful music with no ethnic pandering. Looking fit and appreciative at age 83, Chou Wen-Chung was present to receive the audience's warm applause.
(Aaron Einbond is a Ph.D. candidate in music composition at UC Berkeley.)
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