San Francisco Classical Voice

March 27, 1999

The spectacle of theater was vividly absent at some points and present at others in the third and final concert of Other Minds, the eclectic festival of new music that welcomes composers and musicians from a wide range of disciplines.

The evening began with Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien No. 4, "La remontée du village," which plunged the audience into darkness to hear sounds of a colorful Italian village, and concluded with Mary Ellen Childs' collaborations with CRASH, four percussionists who never sit still. In between were toy piano gems with Margaret Leng Tan, whose performances are fashioned to be as much seen as heard.

Seventy-year-old Ferrari once studied piano with Alfred Cortot and composition with Honegger and Messiaen, but after meeting Varese, quickly developed a unique style of ambient sound documentation as music. The recent tape piece we heard Saturday was recorded by the composer and his collaborator/wife as they walked uphill into an Italian town just across the French border. Isolated from what must have been intense visual stimuli, the sounds intensify footsteps against gravel, children at play, motorbikes, the cadences of French and Italian dialects. The piece becomes progressively more edited and processed until the moos and bells of cows are distorted to almost painful levels. Tape pieces in a concert hall can be monotonous, but Ferrari's ever-evolving work made for a fascinating, collective listening experience.

Monotony is exactly what one would expect from an all-toy piano program, but Margaret Leng Tan manages to coax an inconceivable range of sounds from the tiny instrument. Beginning with a precise, elegant rendition of John Cage's 1948 Suite for Toy Piano--a deceptively simple little treasure using only nine consecutive white notes-- she showed the toy's primitive mechanism capable of crescendo, legato and staccato, accents and glissandi. Or maybe it's only an illusion.

In works composed for her by Guy Klucevsek and Toby Twining, Tan demonstrated the bell-like tone of one toy piano as opposed to the duskier hues of another. She has perfected an "act," strapping on a toy accordion (for Klucevsek's Sweet Chinoiserie) and operating a menagerie of toy rattles, drums, and horns. She reported having to eat nine cans of tuna to find three cans with the right sound. These she turned into finely-pitched percussion instruments tapped with chopsticks. While some may object to Tan's theatrical schtick, and find some of her repertory lightweight, she is a brilliant and deft performer.

CRASH, a quartet of percussionists, introduced five kinetic works by Minnesota composer Mary Ellen Childs, who has been joining movement with rhythm along the lines of Stomp! and other ensembles. The four performers began Drum Roll clustered around a big bass drum in the stage's center, then swiveled off swiftly in rolling office chairs towards smaller drums at the stage's four corners. They tapped each other's drumsticks en route, they bonked the floor with their sticks, and through their fast-paced, graceful choreography the music's texture became more intricate. Sometimes sound was secondary, as in Shiva in which the players held and turned large cymbals as the stage lights flashed against their metallic surfaces. But Childs finds new music in unusual places: the rhythms of zippers pulled up and down, fast and slow; brisk games of patty-cake; palms rubbed together and wooden sticks tapped against mouths.

This year's Other Minds Festival may have lacked the big names of previous years like Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, but Saturday's concert was one of the most playful and engaging in its five-year history.

(Sarah Cahill is a pianist and a music critic for the Express, and hosts a music show on KPFA (94.1 FM) every Friday from 10 am to noon.)

©1999 Sarah Cahill, all rights reserved