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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
March 5-6, 2004
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By Mark Alburger
In its tenth anniversary festival (March 4-6, Yerba Buena Center), Other
Minds continues to be an alternative new-music festival of international
importance. While the founding director Charles Amirkhanian describes
it as "dedicated to the encouragement and propagation of contemporary music in all of its forms," one of the few assumptions that can be fairly made is that its concerts are less likely to feature mid-to-large size ensembles reading sheet music, led by conductors.
Instead the festival is often about music on the borders, making
cross-cultural connections with a variety of world musics in post-minimal contexts. This was certainly true in the first half of Friday's concert with Ashtayama - Song of the Hours (1998) — a collaboration by vocalist Amelia Cuni, electronics wizard Werner Durand, and director-projectionist Uli Sigg. The foundation was Cuni's 10-year study of Indian Dhrupad singing. Durand's layering of Cuni's material, over which she continued to add live realizations, made for stunning effects, augmented by the singer-dancer's own graceful movements and Sigg's alarmingly beautiful visuals. This work had more possible endings than the most recent Lord of the Rings movie, in its eight "Yamas," from "sunrise" to
"deep night," and only the returning image of a light sphere (after fiery
images of cremation and explosions, which elicited gasps from the
audience) signaled visually, if not musically, a ternary closure.
From here it was a quick trip to more traditional electronic chamber music in
Mark Gray's edgy Sands of Time (2004) for cello and live electronic
processing, from local star Joan Jeanrenaud and the composer. After a very
aggressive loopy opening, a contrasting angular plangent lyricism lead to a return to animation, with a nice counterpoint of ascending scalar passages.
The rest of the concert was given over to accordion virtuoso Stefan Hussong, who performed an almost seamless set that featured traditional 10th-century Gagaku, Banshiki no Choshi, two famous Cage works (Dream and In a Landscape, both from 1948), Keiko Harad's Bone+ (1999) and Adriana Holszky's High Way for One Accordion Solo (2000). The Gagaku selection could have been written yesterday, with its series of poseur sustains that could do a devotee of La Monte Young or Morton Feldman proud. The Harad and Holszky works seemingly talked across a Cageian divide to one another, in their series of fits and starts, wheezes and wanderings, squeezes and skirmishes. But it was the Cage selections in all their simplicity that most lingered, certainly due in part to the arresting choreography and costuming of stilt-dancer Pamela Wunderlich. Yes, stilt dancer. Wunderlich appeared as a lonely elongated refugee from an Alberto Giacometti sculpture and dizzied her way slowly across the dim stage to Cage's empty Zen-like, shredded romantic, "proto-minimalist" strains. Her arm extensions writhed like a couple of robotic space serpents. Cage's music on accordion (originally written for piano) seemed tailor-made for all of this. The program the following evening (March 6) continued along similar Other Minds lines established over the years. Joan Jeanrenaud returned in her own Hommage (2004) to Hamza El Din, Terry Riley, and Larry Ochs, which was even more Reichianly cyclic than Gray's work but in overall more languid contexts. Jeanrenaud found poignant early music connections in her dangerous and lovely high-range vocalises, which found her going beyond the fingerboard to regions unknown.
Music-concrete creator Francis Dhomont appeared amidst the audience for two multi-speakered electronic essays — Les moirures du temps (The shimmering ripples of time) (1999/2001) and ”Phonurgie” from Cycle du son (1998) — and ripples were the order of the evening in shimmering noises that bounced from every corner of the darkened theatre, continuing along august, if very steady, paths established by such pioneers as Pierre Schaffer and Edgar Varèse. The "and now for something completely different" for the night was bassist Alex Blake and his Quintet, beginning with an impressive solo improv from the bandleader, in frenetic slap pizzicato and crooning wordless falsetto vocals of the like that extend back to the classic early days of bebop. The most distinctive features of Blake's Quintet were the bassist's prominence (center stage) and a conga player in addition to the usual drummer. This second percussionist, Neil Clarke (who was billed on "tablas," which were not apparent) held forth with an electrifying display of Afro-Latino drumming and vocals that rang true. Beyond Blake's second solo as electric bassist, much of the set was given over to fairly straight-ahead jazz exercises — head tune / series of improvised solos / head tune — that caused a transformation of the audience into a club of hooters and hollerers, with a dissenting minority that hit the door on a fairly regular basis as a small but steady stream of nay-sayers. But hey, it's all part of the boundaries and edges. Amirkhanian took the audience to the Justice League nightclub a while back for a DJ night, so one continues to be amused and surprised by the various twists and turns that is Other Minds.
(Mark Alburger is an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal, oboist, pianist, vocalist, and music
critic.)
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Amelia Cuni,
Joan Jeanrenaud