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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
June 26, 2006
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Pleasure and Pain By Jonathan Russell
Although I recall greatly enjoying the bulk of the program, the final piece on Monday's sfSoundSeries concert at the ODC Theater in San Francisco's Mission district was so traumatic that I have to remind myself again and again how good the rest of the program was. I don't know if the members of the group realized the effect this last piece would have (it featured a guest performer rather then the usual members), but it was too bad, because otherwise it was an excellent and captivating concert.
The show got off to a thrillingly noisy start with Matt Ingalls' raucous clarinet multiphonics, punctuated by Christopher Froh's and Loren Mach's stereophonic, booming bass drum hits from either side of the hall, in Magnus Lindberg's Ablauf (1983, rev. 1988). This was a manically energetic piece, making full use of the whole range of extended techniques for clarinet and bass clarinet and punctuated throughout with the primal sound of bass drum thwacks. Ingalls threw himself into the piece completely, making the extended techniques sound musically convincing and necessary, never like gratuitous special effects. It didn't seem that he was a performer telling his instrument what to do, but rather that he and his instrument melded into a single, unified entity. Toward the middle, when the clarinet came out of his mouth and he produced shouts, growls, and other vocalizations, it seemed completely logical, a natural extension of the preceding raw and intense clarinet sounds.
Vinko Globokar's Dos a Dos (1988), the second-to-last piece on the program, also featured extended techniques and vocalizations but was more explicitly theatrical. Enveloped in darkness, the audience suddenly saw two lights appear at either end of the hall, which we soon realized were coming from miners' helmets atop the heads of Ingalls and trumpeter David Bithell. Throughout the piece, the two performers moved around the performance space in different ways, sometimes turning their lights off, reappearing in new and unexpected configurations: facing each other, facing the audience, standing back-to-back, and once, each placing one arm on the other's shoulder before saying in over-the-top growly voices, "I love you," and then, "I hate you." The music was mostly atonal bubblings and burblings with healthy doses of multiphonics and other extended techniques, ending with hilariously pitiful moans and grumbles from the trumpet, like an extremely sad cat, before both players yelled "Devil take you" to end the piece. It's difficult to capture the spirit of this piece in writing, but it had a deadpan, absurdist humor to it, which caused me and much of the rest of the audience to laugh uncontrollably at several points.
Bithell's composition katajjaq a 6 (2006), second on the program, was based on a traditional vocal game of the Inuit peoples of Canada, and used the group's winds (Bithell on trumpet, Kyle Bruckmann on English horn, Ingalls on clarinet, John Ingle on alto saxophone, Christopher Jones on bassoon, and Toyoji Tomita on trombone) to imitate the interlocking texture of inhaled and exhaled sounds characteristic of this game. Bithell came up with many clever combinations of sounds, using various mutes, multiphonics, special tonguing techniques, and other extended techniques that I couldn't always identify, first with two and later with even more instruments, to translate these vocalizations. The result was intriguing and delightful and made me want to hear the original vocal sounds. It was well-paced, too — just as I started to wonder if perhaps the piece was going on too long, it came to its close. Bassoonist and pianist Christopher Jones' Three Small Forms, which opened the second half, consisted of three brief, detailed movements for trumpet, oboe/English horn, clarinet, and piano. I found nothing especially noteworthy or compelling about these pieces, but they contained some interesting and appealing sounds nonetheless. Jorge Boehringer, the concert's featured "emerging composer-performer," had two premieres on the program. The first, October Language, the first-half closer, used all the winds mentioned above, plus Erik Ulman on violin, and is exactly the sort of texture-based composition that I tend to tire of quickly. It is a tribute to Boehringer that, due to the strong and inventive nature of the textures he used and the way one led to another, this piece held my attention and interest throughout. Often, different colors and techniques in different instruments would coalesce into a coherent and unexpected composite texture, and the textures would build and grow in a way that gave the piece a compelling sense of shape and flow. Near the end, the work settled into an undulating, overlapping, 6/8-feeling, quasi-minimalist groove that, in the context, was startlingly poignant and beautiful.
Much as I liked October Language, Boehringer's other piece had the opposite effect. The concert-closing Mineola 2, PASSAIC, ccarnaisiee for violin and various live electronics, plus two brief cameos for keyboard, was performed entirely by the composer. According to the program notes, it is based on Boehringer's experiences visiting the East Coast. I grew up on the East Coast, and while it has its ups and downs, I can only conclude that Boehringer must have been completely traumatized by his visit. The piece started off unremarkably, with some fairly innocuous processed violin sounds; but fairly early on Boehringer switched to keyboard and created a chord drone that featured high, shrill overtones that hung in the air over everything he did for the next several minutes. It was the sonic equivalent of a high-powered flashlight being shined directly into the eyes. The chord finally stopped, but soon the processed violin sounds became similarly shrill and relentlessly ear-splitting. No piece has ever caused me such intense physical pain as did this one. It was like being punched in the ear over and over and over again. It wasn't shocking or disturbing or offensive, it was just physically painful. I can only conclude that this was either a severe miscalculation on Boehringer's part, or that my ears are more sensitive to high-pitched, loud sounds than most (though, in my defense, I should point out that I saw a number of audience members with their fingers in their ears for much of the piece). Based on October Language, Boehringer clearly has a good ear for texture and pacing. Perhaps his second piece also possessed these qualities. I was in too much pain to notice.
(Jonathan Russell is a professor of musicianship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and music director at First Congregational Church in San Francisco. He is active in the Bay Area as a clarinetist, bass clarinetist, and composer.)
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David Bithell