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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
September 25, 2004
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By Jonathan Russell
Last Saturday at the Community Music Center on Capp Street, sfSoundSeries presented a concert that juxtaposed improvised contemporary music and precisely-notated modernist music. Thanks in large part to the brilliant virtuosity and inventiveness of the featured performers, the improvised music turned out to be by far the more fresh, lively and exciting.
The highlight of the first half was the Trio, performed and “composed” by oboist Kyle Bruckmann, clarinetist Matt Ingalls, and alto saxophonist John Ingle. The piece had a simple predetermined structure that indicated only the order of the type of material to be played. This structure, enabling the three performers to play similar sorts of material at the same time, helped focus the content of the improvisation, resulting, for example, in a section where they were all playing multiphonic trills. The many overtones of each instrument rubbed and vibrated against the overtones from the others, creating a rich, alive, and wild sound. After a contrasting section featuring subtle unpitched or barely pitched blowing, key rattling, and other effects, the piece ended with everyone playing very loudly on very high notes, which created a shockingly electrified sound as the high pitches seared into one another and into the audience's ears. It was at once ear-shatteringly screechingly loud and exhilarating.
The program opened with Christopher Burns' Maxwell's Demon, for an ensemble that included the oboe, clarinet, alto-sax trio described above plus Toyoji Tomita on trombone and Chris Froh on percussion. This took an even more structured approach to improvisation than Bruckmann's later piece, specifying in advance exactly when each instrument would play and stop playing. This necessitated having a conductor, the precise Christopher Jones. All the actual sounds, however, were improvised on the spot by the players, who all exhibited stunning virtuosity with an enormous array of colors and textures. Highlights included Tomita's plunger-mute work and sung multiphonics on the trombone, and saxophonist Ingle's seamless transitions into using his voice as if his saxophone were so excited by how it was being played that it decided to play him. The structure gave the piece a very “composed” feel. It almost could have been a carefully, precisely notated modernist composition in the tradition of Pierre Boulez or Brian Ferneyhough. What gave it away as an improvised piece was the naturalness and joyousness of the playing, pointing to an important difference which became apparent later in the program.
By contrast, the second piece, A Spell for Trombone by the German-Japanese composer Shigeru Kan-no somehow lacked the freshness and excitement of the improvised pieces even though it was performed with brilliant mastery and virtuosity by trombonist Jennifer Baker. The many extended techniques which he used – everything from tapping on the mouthpiece to playing without the mouthpiece to singing to wordless muttering – were, for the most part, fresh and interesting; but they were strung together in a fairly arbitrary way and some seemed to be more work than they were worth. At one point, Baker had to grab a mute quickly, shove it into the bell, and gradually pull it out — an awful lot of effort for something that changed the quality of the sound only minimally. I couldn't help thinking that it would have been preferable, had this very talented and inventive performer worked with these techniques in her own way instead of carefully trying to reconstruct exactly what the composer wanted. Ending the first half was Iannis Xenakis' Epei for English horn, clarinet, trumpet, two trombones and bass. David Bithell on trumpet and David Arend on bass joined the other players. Here again, while the performers played with great skill, the piece, for all of its interesting textures, was mostly noisy and monotonous with near-constant sliding dissonance in the background. This became annoying, much as the meowing of several very hungry cats. The two composed pieces seemed more constrained and stilted and lacked the sense of joyous adventure that characterized the improvised pieces. The second half of the program inhabited another world. It consisted solely of Morton Feldman's fifty-minute Three Voices, arranged by David Bithell for two violins, clarinet, alto saxophone, and two muted trumpets. The original version was composed in 1982 for the singer Joan LaBarbara, who sang one part against a recording of her singing the other two parts. The piece is minimal in its material, wispy, understated and poignant. The arrangement was very effective, although the clarinet and saxophone occasionally seemed a bit too rich in tone color for the grainier violins and muted trumpets. Of particular note was Bithell's solution to the occasional snatches of text sung in the original. He had performers who were not playing at the time whispering words of text. Each player usually had only one word, so the poetry would flit around the semicircle of musicians as if it were being carried on the wind. This was a beautiful and effective solution. There were a few moments when it really did sound as if somehow a trumpet or violin were softly singing. The overall effect was a somewhat richer sonic world than the original version, though no less poignant or arresting. The performers played with delicacy and sensitivity, a welcome contrast to the impetuous virtuosity that characterized the first half of the program.
(Jonathan Russell is a Professor of Musicianship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and an editor with PBA Music Publishing. He is active in the bay area as a clarinetist, bass clarinetist, and composer.)
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