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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
Herb Bielawa
February 16, 2007
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Sounds Classical By Mark Alburger
Composers now can upload their music to the popular MySpace Web site, by establishing a free “Band” Web destination (a rock locution evidently good for individuals, as well). Some music will even be featured by the site. As part of the setup, artists must decide how to characterize their music — "Classical," "Classical-Opera," and "Minimalist" are some possibilities. "Contemporary Classical" and "New Music," locutions that many current composers use, are not part of the option scheme thus far.
Sounds New, a fine East Bay Pierrot Ensemble led by Herb Bielawa, obviously subscribes to the latter term, but the former might even serve as a better characterization, although admittedly it's less catchy. "Sounds Contemporary Classical" is what this expert band of musicians offered at its concert last Friday at Old First Church: a classic, respectful approach to recent music of an academic bent. True to the Schoenberg tradition from Pierrot lunaire (for an ensemble of flute, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello), instrumentation varied throughout the evening, and vocal music was a welcome part of the mix.
The three sung pieces, leading off with Greg Steinke's To Get to Fresno, featured soprano delicacies from Anna Carol Dudley and were all forest-from-the-trees detailed settings of texts that favored recitativelike word painting over melody and through-line. The long poem from which it was drawn, by Lawson Fusao Inada, evidently alludes to the internment of individuals of Japanese heritage in American camps during World War II.
James Jenson buys into another contemporary-classical tradition — that of writing for solo clarinet, so consummately established by Stravinsky in his Three Pieces (1919). Jenson's work, from 1997, bears the same name, and he proves himself up to the challenge of forward movement. While somehow a lonely sadness inevitably attaches itself to unaccompanied monophonic presentations, Jenson's third movement, in particular, danced off to delightful parts unknown, under Richard Mathias' dexterous fingers.
Michael Golden's Bidder to Better stayed in the mind because of its appealing animated interplay between violinist Brooke Aird and pianist Elinor Armer, a lithe pair who made the music fly. Both contributed contrapuntal, alliterative (almost onomatopoeic) whimsy in their rapid recitations of fragments of the title and the verse "You sold your treasure to the lowest bidder; better win it back." Winning, as well, was the entire ensemble, including flutist Deborah Schmidt and cellist Cathy Allen, who made their shining, velvety contributions in the only fully scored work, Summer Solstice. The poem was by Yiorgos Seferis, and this serious work found composer John Thow in his usual element, exhibiting a strong interest in color and line, in untouchable new-music-ensemble form. Sounds New founder/conductor Bielawa (who also served as pianist at other points in the recital) carried off all the proceedings admirably. More kick-up-your-heels was Howard Hersh's Dancing at the Pink House, which referenced clarinetist Patricia Shands' unusual domicile in Stockton, here dynamically performed by Mathias and Bielawa. By contrast, the considerably more serious Hibakusha, by Aaron Alon, offered soloist Schmidt an opportunity to perform a beautiful memorial to survivors of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bielawa's piece, Sloppy Floppy Copy, provided a witty, upbeat disconnect, as its title would suggest, in a three-musician, free-for-all setting of a computer clone derived from Dr. Seuss' Fox in Sox. Solidly in the spirit of Leonard Bernstein's recipe songs and other unexpected text-selections, this was a delightful work that fulfilled the composer's intention to avoid rhythmic "squareness," despite the feeling that periodicity did seem part of the point of the parody. The most soaring contribution to the evening's excursions was Michael Djupstrom's Canopy Dances — avian musical onomatopoeias that took flight in a frenzy of fevered lines, notwithstanding a certain rhythmic evening coolness that underlies this essay of a night in the tropical rainforests. The scoring for the nonkeyboard elements of the Pierrot Ensemble was brilliant. Each instrumentalist took soaring solo turns, as well as demonstrated crack ensemble interlockings that proved that these musicians were, indeed, together as related birds of a feather. It was foxy playing that knocked the socks.
(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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