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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
April 25, 2005
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By Jules Langert
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players' Monday evening concert, aptly titled “A Musical Menagerie,” was well supplied with good performers for each of its five disparate pieces, though much of the music was stronger in style than in substance. An exception was Brian Ferneyhough's Bone Alphabet (2000) for solo percussion ensemble, which had the imaginative vitality to escape the self-conscious artifice and occasional jokiness found elsewhere on the program.
In this performance, Chris Froh, playing from memory, expertly rendered the composer's complex score, molding its short, connected sections into a single, expressive dramatic shape. Ferneyhough specifies that seven instruments with differing timbres are to be used, and he writes rapidly fluctuating rhythms for them, constantly shifting across the spectrum of sounds. But contrasts of tempo, dynamics, and density, plus the composer's long, irregular phrases, give him enough leeway to keep the musical contour from becoming diffuse. This composition was definitely the evening's highlight.
Two of the other pieces, both trios, were examples of postmodern parody. Mason Bates' String Band (2002) for violin, cello, and piano uses pitch bending and repetitive minimalist patterns to evoke a pseudo-bluesy aura. The clattery prepared piano adds a surreal touch as the strings fade in and out of tune, playing blues-like dissonance. Undeniably, there is ingenious fun and some affecting beauty in all this, but the charm wore thin as Bates prolonged the music past the point where some new material would have been most welcome. Stephen Hartke's The Horse with the Lavender Eye (1997) for violin, clarinet, and piano is rife with clever instrumental gimmicks in the service of comic illustration. Eighteenth century dramatist Carlo Goldoni and cartoonist R. Crumb provided inspiration for two of its four movements, which feature frenzied syncopations and quirky, obsessive repetitions, among several other kinds of whimsical zaniness.
Georgia Spiropoulos' Music for 2 ? (2000) is a more experimental kind of piece, combining pre-recorded tape with live instruments in some engaging and inventive ways. Tod Brody, besides playing his usual C flute and occasionally the bass flute, also did some breathy vocalizing and periodically had to strike a nearby suspended cymbal. Pianist Teresa McCollough also had some sibilant whispering to do, the two performers at moments sounding like a pair of desperate conspirators. All of these sonic details and some special effects for the prepared piano were integrated with the tape very skillfully, producing a strange and playfully fascinating soundscape almost as intriguing visually as it was aurally. Shulamit Ran's Under the Sun's Gaze (2004) was the final work, a commission by the Koussevitsky Foundation for the SFCMP, receiving its first performance. It is scored for a fairly large ensemble, including alto flute, piccolo, two bass clarinets, soprano saxophone, two strings, piano, and percussion, the flutes and clarinets alternating with their more conventional versions. It was a loose-knit and rambling composition with surprisingly little to say, given its seventeen-minute length and colorful instrumentation. Its style is eclectic — dissonant, but quite easy on the ear, with arabesque-like figuration, possibly suggesting Ran's Israeli origin. Its broadly unobtrusive rhythmic structure underpins the work's melodic impulse, which dominates the texture. Occasional passages with dotted rhythms and quartal harmony seemed quaint and anomalous, like a stylistic intrusion from the past. There isn't really much more I can say about this work, the concert's major presentation, except that it was an unmemorable anticlimax. Viewing the evening's program from my perch in the stands, the largest animal in this musical menagerie turned out to resemble a white elephant.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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Brian Ferneyhough
Shulamit Ran 
Chris Froh
