Like a dreamer paralyzed in a nightmare, unable to move or speak, Fritz Lang's legendary silent film, Metropolis, soundlessly screams for help from an accompanying musical score. Indeed, when the film was first released in Germany's Weimar Republic of the late 1920s, an original score was composed to circulate alongside it. As viewers watched it in theaters, live orchestras would have performed the music.
On initial consideration, some people might think of musical composition as an outlet for unbridled, free-flowing creativity. In truth, though, composing is inevitably conditioned and constrained by all sorts of factors, such as historical conventions and social expectations. Nonetheless, the contemporary French composer Philippe Hurel has spoken of finding room for individuality — “his own space of freedom” — within such frameworks.
Shadows are necessarily murky entities. They create spaces in which edges soften and distinctions blur. The program title “Flowing Shadows,” therefore, suited a concert emphasizing convergence between multiple artistic disciplines. This concert, given Saturday in the San Francisco Conservatory’s Hume Concert Hall, was the fourth of five performances in this year’s BluePrint series, a new-music program under the direction of Nicole Paiement. The overriding theme of BluePrint’s current season is “Crosscurrents ... where arts converge.”
Even though atonal music has existed for a long time, the composer Helmut Lachenmann has observed that many listeners are still so accustomed to tonal music that tonality continues to govern their listening habits. Such listeners might regard tonality as an intrinsic or “natural” musical system, against which contemporary music sounds, by contrast, “unnatural.” But Monday in Herbst Theatre, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players performed a concert that associated contemporary music with nature.
The music of Steve Reich can sound deceptively simple. After all, for about 50 years, his name has been associated with so-called minimalism. The term vaguely denotes music built from the repetition and layering of simple musical modules over harmonies and temporal pulsations that remain relatively constant. Yet at Stanford University’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium on Saturday, an all-Reich concert performed by So Percussion, a percussion quartet, made the virtuosic complexity of Reich’s music abundantly clear.
Since Christmas celebrates the birth of the Holy Son, a piece about the death of an earthly girl might seem out of place on a holiday concert. This weekend, though, the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, the Grammy-nominated chorus directed by Lynne Morrow and Richard Grant, delivered a winter concert that revolved around precisely such a piece.
Sergei Prokofiev was a Russian composer who lived through tumultuous historical events. He was born in 1891, and during his youth music teetered between the so-called “Romantic” and “modern” periods. Following the Russian Revolution of 1918, he moved first to the U.S., then to Europe. For reasons that still bewilder scholars, he chose to return to the U.S.S.R. in the mid-1930s, despite iron-fisted Soviet censorship of the arts; he died in 1953 in Moscow. Prokofiev’s compositional output reflects the diversity of these stylistic and political circumstances.
One meaning of meridian is pinnacle, or the highest possible point. This denotation surely befits the Meridian Arts Ensemble, which is a brass quintet — two trumpets, horn, trombone, and tuba — plus a percussionist. To great critical acclaim, the group has recorded and performed extensively in both national and international venues for over 20 years.
The Web site for an upcoming sfSound concert on Aug. 9 includes a video of Karlheinz Stockhausen, a famous German composer, speaking about human evolution. The idea of evolution suits this concert on two levels.
The contemporary chamber music concert that I attended Sunday evening was refreshingly free of gimmickry. For example, it took place in the ODC Dance Commons in San Francisco’s Mission District: a humble, but also accommodating, performance space. The program, by sfSound, also did not boast any flashy title or unifying theme. Nor was it accompanied by hollow reassurances about contemporary music’s being made palatable to the public.
Anyone who has ever played a video game likely knows that, just as the contours of its control pad can become imprinted on the hand, so too can the game’s musical themes leave lasting impressions on the memory.
I left the performance I attended on Thursday with the feeling that I got two concerts for the price of one. In truth, it was just that one musician, cellist Zoë Keating, opened for another, vocalist Amy X Neuburg.
The idea that numerical properties underlie music has interested people since at least the Middle Ages. Back then, people believed that orderly ratios underpinned not only music, but even planetary movement — the harmonious yet inaudible “music of the spheres.” In our own time, the Adorno Ensemble’s upcoming concert showcases relationships between music and numbers that interest contemporary composers.
The composer Kurt Weill and the city of Berlin are often mentioned in the same breath. Both the composer and the city are icons of the Weimar Republic, the name given to Germany’s government between 1919 and 1933.
Who is László Klangfarben, and what is a Schick Machine? Those were the two burning questions on the minds of audience and protagonist alike during Schick Machine, a theatrical and musical work commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and premiered Saturday evening at Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium.
Initially, it might seem unimaginable that a silent film from the late 1920s could occasion a West Coast premiere of a musical score. But when the score is one composed for the film, then the situation becomes feasible, indeed.
The film is Metropolis, a Weimar Republic work directed by Fritz Lang in 1927. Martin Matalon, who created the score, is an Argentinean-born composer with connections to IRCAM, the Paris institution for computer music. Matalon's score is orchestrated for both electronics and a symphony orchestra.
By definition, contemporaneity is an integral component of new music. But contemporary circumstances obviously engulf more than musical concerns: From war to the environment to the financial crisis, there are plenty of present-day issues that have nothing to do with music. But this is not to say that contemporary music cannot reflect on these social issues.
Precisely such reflection is the theme for the seventh season of BluePrint, a new-music concert series directed by Nicole Paiement at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
The performance I attended Saturday night began with a single performer, dressed in a white tunic, dancing on the stage while waving a flag. Immediately I grew nervous. I knew the performance was supposed to convey spiritual ascension, or even transcendence. The past week had been a rough one for me, and by attending this performance, I was hoping for a little transcendence of my own — some respite, however ephemeral, from my worldly worries. But this first performer seemed to be enacting a ritual to which I personally remained uninitiated.
Abstract, intimidating, unintelligible: These are words I often hear used to describe new music. People who use them might assume that every new-music festival is chock-full of serious, difficult sounds that can daunt even trained musicians, not to mention the musically uninitiated.
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, however, fits no such description. In fact, it even makes room for some child's play. This new-music festival, now in its 46th season, held its annual children's concert Sunday at the Santa Cruz Civil Auditorium.
From Beethoven to Wagner to Schoenberg, Johann Sebastian Bach influenced the subsequent course of Western music. Everybody knows that. Particularly influential is Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. This work consists of two volumes, each of which features one prelude and one fugue in every major and minor key. Since Well-Tempered Clavier is a staggering compendium of Bach's contrapuntal techniques, classical performers and composers alike learn from it still today.
ike a dreamer paralyzed in a nightmare, unable to move or speak, Fritz Lang's legendary silent film, Metropolis, soundlessly screams for help from an accompanying musical score. Indeed, when the film was first released in Germany's Weimar Republic of the late 1920s, an original score was composed to circulate alongside it. As viewers watched it in theaters, live orchestras would have performed the music.
“Romantic” and “modern” periods. Following the Russian Revolution of 1918, he moved first to the U.S., then to Europe. For reasons that still bewilder scholars, he chose to return to the U.S.S.R. in the mid-1930s, despite iron-fisted Soviet censorship of the arts; he died in 1953 in Moscow. Prokofiev’s compositional output reflects the diversity of these stylistic and political circumstances.
I left the performance I attended on Thursday with the feeling that I got two concerts for the price of one. In truth, it was just that one musician, cellist Zoë Keating, opened for another, vocalist Amy X Neuburg.
