The draw was a milestone of Modernism, Pierre Boulez’ Le Marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master, 1955), which took up the second half of the program. According to Music Director David Milnes, the difficulty of the score absorbed up to 50 hours of preparation time for members of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. “It just pulls something out of you — an edge,” declared percussionist Christopher Froh during the preconcert discussion.

That the effort was a labor of love was evident in the care with which Milnes conducted the work, and in the concentrated enthusiasm that the instrumentalists (flute, xylophone, vibraphone, percussion, guitar, and viola) put into the performance. Mezzo-soprano Janna Baty, who contributed her lusciously calibrated voice to the effort and has sung the work many times elsewhere, informed the audience: “It’s really cool; it’s so groovy and funky … it’s cool beyond belief.”

The difficulty of the score lies in the serialized, constant shifts of meter and pitch duration, as well as the absence of repetition, more a requirement for ultra-diligent score reading than virtuoso muscular technique. When performed as well as the Contemporary Music Players handled the challenge, a unique world of kaleidoscopic clarity emerges, with sounds as off kilter and juxtaposed as the occasional words by surrealist poet René Char (as in, “Pure eyes in the woods/ Weeping seek the habitable head”).

The Real Audience Winner

However, despite the reputation of the Boulez work as “a keystone of 20th-century music” (New Grove Dictionary), and its placement in taking up the entire second half of the program, the evident audience favorite was Luca Francesconi’s A fuoco (1995), which received hoots and cheers at the end of the first half for its ensemble-accompanied guitar soloist, David Tanenbaum.

The 40 years that separate the Boulez from this work reminded me how pulse, apotheosized by Stravinsky and which later permeated almost all forms of music, has remained a chief driver of musical affect in the face of the calculated attempt of Boulez to deconstruct it with his Marteau. A fuoco had the pace and direction that the Boulez seemed to lack. Maybe if the Marteau had been played at its advertised 35-minute duration (it took 10 minutes longer), its impact would have been strengthened, but Boulez himself has conducted it slower in recent years, and such an approach could have clouded its exquisite clarity.

The program began with two highly contrasting works played by different solo cellists. The first, Sept Papillons, was by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose operas and work in the French spectral school have gained her eminence. But these studies would have been better titled Sept Papillons Vampiriques — while the seven short études’ butterflies emerged via numerous fluttering techniques, Leighton Fong’s bow was ordered to remain for the most part near the bridge of the instrument (sul ponticello), producing a 12-minute bloodletting of tiresome scrapes. What a relief, then, to hear hints of Chinese melody, and far more variety, in Zhou Long’s wistful Wild Grass, beautifully played by Stephen Harrison.

My neck marks began to heal, and the fascinating progression of sections in the Francesconi that followed provided a complete cure. I left at the end grateful that the Players had for a moment abandoned their title of Contemporary in honor of Boulez’ old piece, and reassured that love of Modernist music is not confined to a few dying professors, but still captures the attention of audiences and musicians alike. After all, plain and simple, good music is good music of whatever stripe.

Wouldn’t that be something — if a few musicians were gathered around a candlelit piano and recited incantations, encircled by a hundred or so strangers, who, through sheer will and musical devotion, succeeded in summoning an ultramodernist ancestor, whose flickering silhouette proceeded to sit down, adjust the bench, and play? (Of course, if the spirit weren’t making an appearance that night, one of the musicians could fill in.)

Instead, as at most themed concerts I’ve attended, what happened was this: Performers came out and played music for an audience who listened, clapped, then, finally, went home.

If the “stuff” of themes is what people crave, shouldn’t it be reflected in more than a name and (admittedly charming) lighting?

I just wonder if there’s a connection between the reluctance to engage in nonstandardized performance rituals and the lack of attention paid to a composer like Ruth Crawford (Seeger). Her music was featured heavily on the concert, and rightly so — after hearing Sarah Cahill perform four of the Nine Preludes for Piano, the only reason I can imagine they aren’t part of the canon is that many performers before her must have thought that if they were worthwhile, why, then, someone else would have championed them.

What’s extraordinary is how accessible these pieces are, given Crawford’s unswerving pursuit of a dissonant harmonic language. It’s not easy music, but at the same time it’s hard to lose track of where it’s headed, for each phrase flows naturally to the next, smoothly but never monotonously. Contrast this with Scriabin’s tantalizingly brief Five Preludes, Op. 74 that opened the concert. His forms are so compressed and cryptic that it would have been useful to hear them again, after the Crawford, as Glenn Gould famously did when playing Webern and Beethoven.

There’s a flexible, seemingly effortless rise and fall to Crawford’s music that Cahill brought out splendidly, especially in Prelude No. 5 and the virtuosic Piano Study in Mixed Accents. The latter took the moto perpetuo finale of Chopin’s B-flat Minor Sonata as its point of departure, but instead of parodying it as Ligeti would later do (in his Selbst-Porträit for two pianos), Crawford uses various accent patterns to give the impression of a slower, lurching tune that spills into the foreground — a kind of “melody-within-a-melody” that, under Cahill’s fingers, never faltered.

Inspiriting the Past

Many of the evening’s works drew heavily on music of a more distant past (a séance within a Séance?), extending it, as in the Crawford study, and rehashing it, as in Henry Cowell’s folk-inspired Sonata for Violin and Piano. With Lou Harrison’s Largo Ostinato, the allusive nature is, like much of Harrison’s output, well … elusive. It clearly drew on Chopin’s Barcarolle in form and gesture, yet it’s not nostalgic, it doesn’t engage in a dialectic, and it never sounds sardonic. Maybe it simply sits on the past, unlike Cowell’s Tiger, which rides Liszt’s Transcendental Études into the land of sprawling clusters. Yet in Tiger, the beauty came well after the bombast, emanating from the long decays that Cahill carefully set off and allowed to resonate, to great effect.

In addition to Cahill’s solos, Kate Stenberg, violin, and Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano, put forth three duos, one by the unknown-to-me Johanna Beyer, who was a student of both Cowell and Crawford. Minus one strange opening motive where the violinist retakes the bow on each repeated note, Beyer’s Suite for Violin and Piano was quite compelling, veering off into an unpredictable episodic form that featured some lively interplay between Zimmermann and Stenberg.

The last piece of the night was Crawford’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, in which Stenberg’s careful pacing captured the singing phrases of Crawford’s musical language wonderfully, her final gesture capping off a superb performance.

True to this spirit, Other Minds presented these performances as “a new music séance summoning the specters of musical forbears [and] channeling the spirits of their successors.” The second of the day’s three programs, titled “Deep River Dreams,” was given over to works for piano and violin, with “forbears” Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Olivier Messiaen, Samuel Barber, and Morton Feldman appearing alongside contemporary “successors” Ingram Marshall, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Mamoru Fujieda.

The afternoon began on a not particularly spiritual note. The opener, Barber’s Excursions (1944), combines the composer’s “neoromantic” musical language (as it is sometimes called) with hints of jazz. Pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann did much to bring out the youthfulness of the work, Barber’s first official composition for solo piano. In the second movement, “In Slow Blues Tempo,” Zimmermann played with a sense of novelty that I imagine inspired the musical “excursions” to which Barber’s title refers.

The next piece, Messiaen’s Eight Preludes (1929), calls for a more serious tone. Especially in the movements chosen for performance, “The Impalpable Sounds of Dream” and “Bells of Anguish and Tears of Farewell,” the work foreshadows the mysticism that would characterize Messiaen’s entire career. Zimmermann erred perhaps too strongly on the side of humility, for by emphasizing the music’s inscrutable mystery she sacrificed the emotional intensity that was equally a part of Messiaen’s spirituality. In Zimmermann’s reading, the recurring tritone motive that haunts the latter movement was merely enigmatic, inspiring neither fear nor awe.

Of the program’s works, Feldman’s two Piano Pieces (1955-56) were most suited to a musical “séance.” Like other compositions by him, the Piano Pieces call for an almost oppressive blanket of silence, with a sparse constellation of notes only occasionally breaking the surface. The task of performing such a piece can sometimes require something like religious patience and concentration, and pianist Sarah Cahill displayed both. Many of the Piano Pieces’ effects, like the subtle resonances in the piano’s strings created by silently depressing the keys, were unrealizable in the church’s close quarters, but this only enhanced the sense of mystic ritual: Both Cahill and the audience were striving for an impossible ideal.

Delving Into the Black Experience

Two works on the program turned to a different source of musical spirituality: African-American culture. Coleridge-Taylor’s Deep River, from his 24 Negro Melodies, was presented here in an arrangement for violin and piano. Violinist Kate Stenberg did not play with the same level of technical refinement as Zimmermann or Cahill (her vibrato seemed inconsistently and in some cases arbitrarily applied), though this humanized the piece rather than detracted from it.

Still, it was a more convincing nod to the African-American experience than Ingram Marshall’s Movement (Deep in My Heart), here given its world premiere. The piece purports to be based on Debussy’s Mouvement as well as on the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome. The music, however, was too preoccupied with technical matters (the opening section of the piece restricts itself to the first five notes of the major scale) to allow the protest song to leave much of an impression.

The remaining pieces left spirituality far behind, or at least demonstrated that “channeling” composers’ spirits meant simply performing their music. Gabriela Lena Frank’s Sueños de Chambi: Snapshots for an Andean Album (2002), inspired by photographs of Peruvian culture, paired Stenberg and Zimmermann in a Bartókian, folk-inflected work for violin and piano. The work was more varied than that description might suggest, though, relying as much on lyricism as on energetic rhythms and folk scales. Mamoru Fujieda’s The Olive Branch Speaks (also in its premiere performance) takes its inspiration from even more dubiously spiritual sources: “melodic patterns [based on] the data of slight changes of electric potential found in living plants,” according to the composer. In practice, this involves more-or-less tonal harmonies in the kind of gentle oscillation that one would imagine governing the inner workings of plants.

In spite of its fanciful ambitions, Other Minds’ “Séance” was in all respects a concert, notwithstanding the gothic candelabra (nearly knocked over when the performers took a bow) and an ambient, pine-scented aroma. Yet the performance’s spiritual overtones provided a sense of shared community. “Deep River Dreams” could have devolved into self-congratulatory New Age cliches, but it never did. The sincerity was palpable at all times, and I daresay Emanuel Swedenborg himself would have approved.

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 title for BluePrint’s current season is “The Urgency of Now: Lending an Ear to Burning Issues.” Saturday night’s installment was called “Transparent Walls.” Both directly and indirectly, the pieces on this program questioned the interconnectedness of life.

For example, by bringing the issue of environmental destruction to the fore, the opening piece pondered the loss of life that can result from such interconnectedness. It was titled Requies Ranarum, a piece for chamber ensemble, soprano, and electronics, by Philip Collins. The piece is not structured like a Catholic Requiem, but modeled instead after Protestant memorial services. It is, in fact, an elegy for eight extinct frog species. Collins was inspired to write the piece on hearing a Smithsonian recording of North American frog sounds, in part because the musical variety of these sounds offered fertile material for electroacoustic manipulation.

But Collins, a self-proclaimed lover of amphibians, also included a soprano part within Requies Ranarum, whose text consists exclusively of the Latin names for extinct species of frogs. The piece’s instrumental parts both imitated the recorded frog sounds and created soundscapes that evoked their habitats. For example, in one movement that explicitly featured sounds of frogs in danger or distress, the instrumentalists created a foreboding atmosphere that culminated with foot-stomping: the sound of humans literally and ominously encroaching on the frogs. Saturday night’s performance was the premiere of this piece’s third version, a version that both Collins and the audience deemed successful.

Anguishing Questions

Whereas Requies Ranarum dealt with the destruction of wildlife, the evening’s final piece, Midday Prayers, by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, seemed to question the destruction of human life. The work belongs within a four-part cycle, called Life Without Christmas. It is scored for 19 instruments, a solo clarinet, and a boy’s voice, which was performed on Saturday by a female soprano. Both the clarinetist and the vocalist performed from balconies. The instrumental parts on stage, meanwhile, created what Kancheli describes as a “sound-world of anguish and desolation.” This sound-world largely consists of layered, sustained pitches played without vibrato. Near the end of the piece, the vocalist finally enters to sing two lines drawn from the Passion of Christ: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” There may have been ephemeral moments of epiphany or transfiguration in this music, but the overall effect was one of overwhelming loss and despair.

The inner two pieces on this program were existential ruminations translated into music. The first, YX Unsquared, by Young-Shin Choi, is the product of the composer’s ongoing attempt to find his own compositional voice in the interrelation of his Korean and Western cultural backgrounds. It uses Western instruments, but attempts to replicate a Korean technique called nonghyon, a term that means wavering pitch. The piece also features asymmetric rhythms — hence the “unsquared” of its title. In some ways, the piece’s rhythmically distinct layers and subtle melodic fluctuations evoke techniques of minimalism, but YX Unsquared also elicits a swaying, immediate dynamism that is distinctly its own.

The title of Aleksandra Vrebalov’s piece provided the entire program with its name: “Transparent Walls.” This work was commissioned by San Francisco Conservatory, and Saturday’s performance was also its premiere. Vrebalov, a Serbian-American composer, likens the cello part of her work to an individual seeking order and meaning in the interrelatedness of everything, an interrelatedness that is obscure yet discernible.

This piece also includes winds, brass, and percussion. These other parts interact with the cello line in ways that seem at times intentional, at times coincidental. The resultant mosaic of motivic connections culminates with what sounds like shrieking sirens. Following this climax is stillness — albeit stillness that is perhaps more charged with apprehension than with tranquility. “Transparent Walls” surely conveyed what the composer described as a “moment of disturbing realization.”

In the end, the entire “Transparent Walls” program did indeed entertain urgent “burning issues,” issues both social and musical. But all these issues were given voice only through eloquent musical execution. From programming to performance, this concert series is persuasive indeed. Its upcoming installment on March 7 is highly recommended.

I have no earthly idea what any of that means. But I did enjoy listening to his piece Gated Eclipse, for Pierrot plus percussion and electronics. The drama was provided almost exclusively through crunchy, noise-based timbres that would ease their way into the mix. The acoustic instruments, by contrast, shone most in the moments where the electronics tapered off to reveal their deeper intimacy, sounding at once as if a “pause” button had been applied to the entire ensemble.

At the climax of the piece, the electronics greatly overshadowed the acoustic instruments, in both volume and intensity. While well-paced in a formal sense, conceptually this electronic pride of place shifted the focus from the musical to the technical, making a key musical moment into a (seemingly) accidental celebration of technology. It even brought to mind the question the trombonist explicitly asks in Berio’s Sequenza V after sardonically cutting the music short: “Why?”

This question came up again with Mario Davidovsky’s newest addition to his Synchronisms: No. 12, for clarinet and electronics. He has upgraded his composer’s toolbox to include snippets of real clarinet sounds as source material — certainly no groundbreaking technique, but striking nonetheless when compared to the more ascetic backdrop of No. 6 for piano, from nearly four decades ago. In the electronic part of No. 12, more or less “normal” clarinet sounds pop up here and there, though in the acoustic realm it is unclear why the clarinetist is given no corresponding “bag of tricks,” such as extended techniques that would mimic or prod the electronic textures.

Ironically, the more “archaic” sounds in the tape part created the most tension and interest, revealing the composer’s extraordinary ear for even the smallest details of an instrument’s sound color. Especially memorable was Carey Bell’s full, resilient tone, able to convey a sudden, incisive lyricism in two or three notes before the line leapt elsewhere.

Mismatched Threads

The concert’s theme, “American Mosaic,” struck me as funny, as I wondered how exactly Dmitri Tymoczko’s Four Dreams got sewn in with Davidovsky’s Synchronisms. They are surely at opposite ends of the quilt, or perhaps even opposing sides of it. Either way, it’s unclear what miraculous thread binds them to the same program.

Performed with bass clarinet, percussion, piano, and electronics that included narration, Four Dreams reveled in cliche. Where Davidovsky’s elusive line hinted at solace in a near-constant state of flittering madness, Tymoczko’s artless refrains lingered incessantly on stolid, boxy musical figures that made blunt associations with imagery or action from the text.

Lest my own position on this musical quilt be assumed, I might as easily put it differently: The Synchronisms have an ambiguous, maybe even uneasy, relationship with musical reference (was that ever-so-brief trill at the beginning a Rhapsody in Blue reference? Is that a profane question?). Tymoczko’s music, however, thrives unapologetically on such references, leading to a lively, often-wry energy that is at times undeniably infectious.

Lei Liang’s Trio was a curious and compelling piece because it seemed to inhabit the space somewhere between the two pieces described above. The ethereal, abstract sonorities it created on piano, cello, and percussion at the beginning and end had little to do with the modal middle section that not only evoked dance rhythms, but itself danced. The aesthetic distance traversed over the short span was refreshing, owing in large part to the concision and clarity of each individual phrase or figure.

Chris Froh gave a striking treatment to the work’s central drum solo, conjuring up one of the more expressive and lyrical bass drum diminuendos I’ve ever heard. If you think it’s peculiar to pair the words lyrical and bass drum together, well, then, you ought to go hear Froh play on a concert sometime.

Reynold Tharp’s Littoral, for solo piano, also featured some fitting material for a fine SFCMP player, Julie Steinberg, whose crisp, sensitive interpretation illuminated buried layers of activity, especially as the harmony expanded toward the end. In one beautifully written phrase, Steinberg fashioned a cantabile line built from the lower notes of each sprawling chord, producing a distant, muted song that underlay a bustling musical surface.

Ending the program was Elliott Carter’s Luimen, a quirky piece in which hockets (a kind of musical hiccup) pass as easily from harp to trumpet as they do from mandolin to trombone and back. This is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink piece, and I was informed after the concert that Carter’s Shard for solo guitar, a piece I’ve analyzed, is actually embedded in the middle of Luimen. I had no idea, so I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether that says more about me as a reviewer than it does about Carter’s compositional aesthetic.

Elliott Carter

The concert began with Jennifer Higdon’s Dark Wood (2001) for bassoon plus piano trio. The ghost of Stravinsky could be heard throughout this energetically rhythmic piece, declaring his influence on the “modern” repertoire, especially in America. (Stravinsky, in particular, was a central model for the famed Paris-based Nadia Boulanger and her illustrious pupils, who included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Carter.)

As Higdon noted in the program, Dark Wood showcases the bassoon within the context of a traditional chamber ensemble. On paper, it’s an anomalous coupling of instrumental forces, yet Earplay made it sound remarkably natural. Bassoonist Rufus Oliver deserves a good deal of credit for his work. He confidently led the way, while at other times he fell back comfortably into a supporting role, handing the reins to violinist Terrie Baune and cellist Daniel Reiter. Quietly holding the ensemble together was pianist Michael Seth Orland, propelling the work’s kinetic energy with his usual laserlike precision.

A triptych of Carter works followed. One of the true grand old men of American music, Carter is known chiefly for his formidable and forbidding complexity. One glance at his scores, heavy with arcane rhythmic patterns, constant tempo changes, and a harmonic language offering no hints as to its logic, can set your head spinning.

The Lighter Side of Carter

It was refreshing, then, to hear Earplay perform Carter with a gaiety not frequently associated with his music. First came Steep Steps (2001) for bass clarinet. While the musical language was characteristic of Carter — disjointed series of notes spanning all registers, only occasionally congealing into something melodic — the joy of the piece came in clarinetist Peter Josheff’s demonstration of his instrument’s versatility. Many members of the audience seemed surprised at just how many different kinds of sounds could come out of a bass clarinet.

Next came another nod to Stravinsky, this one explicit: Carter’s Canon for Three Equal Instruments “In Memoriam Igor Stravinsky,” composed in the year of Stravinsky’s death (1971). This wisp of a piece clocked in at under one minute, and the audience received it as the charming miniature that it is. Both the performers and the audience gave a chuckle when the piece ended. Finally, Carter’s Au quai (2002) for bassoon and viola was performed with a sense of humor befitting the piece’s punning title (pronounced “o-kay”). Bassoonist Oliver and violist Ellen Ruth Rose put on an impressive physical and acoustical display. Rose’s part, especially, called for an almost theatrical showcase of violin techniques, but still the duo managed to humanize Carter’s often inscrutable music.

In stark contrast to the evening’s lightheartedness, Eric Zivian’s Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, in its premiere performance, offered much heavier and introspective fare. The composer himself took the piano, and though the work featured three musicians it was clear that it was an intensely private matter. Every dynamic swell and grand pause was accompanied by a full-body frisson. At several points Zivian’s hand instinctively shot up as if wanting to conduct. The work’s dramatic (at times melodramatic) rhetoric sometimes bordered on indulgent, but it was a welcome challenge to conventional assumptions about new music: Although Zivian’s Trio was the most pointedly atonal work of the evening (though not without occasional triads), it was also the most Romantic.

Novelty With a Pedigree

The real novelties were reserved for the second half. Pablo Furman’s Sureña (2005) was scored for violin and laptop. With Furman himself at its helm, the computer translated violinist Graeme Jennings’ actions into electronic effects and fed them back into the piece. In effect, Jennings was accompanied by a sonic backdrop that he himself was generating. At times these effects consisted of brief echoes; at other times the computer seemed to create an entire electronic symphony. Amazingly, Jennings’ wizardly technique proved to be more than a match for the computer, and he produced all manner of sound effects on his own.

Closing out the evening was William Kraft’s Vintage Renaissance and Beyond (2004), an essay in one of the tried and true techniques of 20th-century composition, pastiche. Here Stravinsky seemed to rear his head one last time, since it is to him that American composers owe the belief that pre-Romantic repertoires can be mined for anti-Romantic purposes. (”What has always attracted me to early music,” Kraft writes, “was the directness and clarity of expression, as opposed to the dramatic and emotionally laden works in the 19th century repertory.”)

In Kraft’s case, medieval antiphons and Renaissance dances provided the material. Kraft presented these preexisting tunes intact, adding “graffiti” here and there: mildly jarring harmonies, sporadic outbursts interrupting the tunes, faint echoes of previously heard music. In earlier times, this kind of anti-Romantic pastiche would have assumed a more polemical tone, but audiences today seem to have grown accustomed to it. Kraft’s playful work elicited another good-natured chuckle from the audience at the end — perhaps a glimpse of promising directions that American music might take in the 21st century.

The performance was the premiere of Songs of Ascension, a work by Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton, commissioned in part by Stanford Lively Arts, and presented at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium. Monk (profiled here) composed the music and choreographed the work’s movement. Hamilton created its visual elements. Thus the piece combined music, movement, and visuals with the aim of evoking the otherworldly, or some higher, spiritual realm.

Despite the plural “songs” in the title, the program ran continuously, without pausing even for an intermission. Aside from Monk herself, other performers included Monk’s Ensemble, a group of five vocalists and two instrumentalists. Since Monk herself was ill, two of these vocalists necessarily covered some of her lines. Songs of Ascension also incorporated a string quartet, performed by the Todd Reynolds String Quartet with one substituting violist. Members of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble participated, as well.

Songs of Ascension was inspired by Hamilton’s eight-story Tower, a sculpture in Alexander Valley, California, whose allusive power for evoking the spiritual impressed Monk. The vocal parts especially seemed indebted to the idea of some monumental space. By and large, however, these parts seemed nothing more than short, percussive, syllabic utterances, layered in minimalistic fashion. If these utterances carried any semantic value, their meaning was lost on me, which reminded me of my failure to appreciate the initial waving flag. The vocal parts were amplified and placed around the room, resounding from the stage, balcony, and aisles of the auditorium; I did understand that the resultant effect was an illusion of exaggerated space.

Spiritual Rituals

The piece seemingly did reference specific religious rituals. For example, some vocalists wore red robes that resembled the traditional garb of Tibetan monks, and at times they sat cross-legged on the floor. As I watched the performers, I thought about how my own wandering mind impedes my ability to meditate. At that moment, my mind indeed wandered back to my initial worry: Perhaps I was failing to appreciate the power of this piece because I was unfamiliar with the spiritual rituals to which it was alluding.

Meanwhile, Ann Hamilton’s images were projected all around the auditorium. They formed a recurring repertory that included a bird in flight, a man riding a horse, typewritten letters of the alphabet, a ship, and lines of feet wearing shoes. Like primitive animation, they moved choppily along the auditorium walls. I found myself puzzled about their meaning, too. They seemed to depict the mundane or the commonplace, as well as vehicles of freedom and escape. I wondered whether I was interpreting them “correctly,” or if instead I was thinking too much, trying too hard to rationalize images that were intended solely for sensory experience.

In short, I sat for some time feeling not at all exalted by Songs of Ascension, but instead beaten down by a sense of failing to belong, or of failing to comprehend. Eventually, though, I heard the string quartet playing, and I realized that even I understand at least one route to transcendence: synergy, which happens when four string players combine to form a unified whole whose greatness exceeds that of its parts. And I began to see synergy all around me. I had already understood the synergism of the space-enhancing vocal lines, for example. I also realized that my uncertainty about any individual images or gestures did not prevent me from appreciating that they combine to represent bigger, communal rituals.

This performance that began with a single person waving a flag ended with performers filing down the aisle of the auditorium, each waving a similar flag. This time, though, the flags signaled something I understood: ternary form, a shape whose ending recapitulates its own beginning. The performers on the stage, meanwhile, began to lie down. As the diverse performing forces enacted this common gesture, I was reminded of the respite I myself had craved at the start of the performance. But I no longer felt like the outsider I did then. If only for this ephemeral, 70-minute piece, I myself felt part of this work’s elusive synergism — part of an experience whose meaning exceeded, but also included, my own ability to understand.

In a spirit of celebration, then, for its season opener last Tuesday in the Veterans Building Green Room, the group commissioned pieces from no fewer than seven composers.

Richard Felciano’s Festa got things off to a bright, vivid start, as pianist Marc Shapiro and vibraphonist Jack Van Geem built up a shimmering texture of toccata-like patterns punctuated by long-held, resonant sonorities, evoking the sound of chimes and bells pulsating with energy.

At the other end of the program, Matthew Cmiel’s rambunctious Dance Like Mad closed the concert with percussionists Van Geem, Artie Storch, and Ward Spangler cooking up a raucous din at center stage on an upended red bass drum. Heaps of additional percussion were augmented by exotic sounds from the “Lion’s Roar” and a noisy battery of oil cans. Several episodes were begun after a coin was flicked onto the bass drumhead, its sound of gently rolling thunder spreading to the other instruments and generating some extravagant antiphonal responses.

Probing Keyboard and String Sounds

The remainder of the program was made up of instrumental duos and trios, the most interesting and memorable of which was Edmund Campion’s From Swan Songs. This work grew out of discussions and collaborations between the composer and violinist David Abel. It attempts to add various avant-garde sounds and techniques to the violin’s traditional performance practices, and to integrate them with the piano.

Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg formed a tightly knit duo, in which the two instruments complemented and reinforced each other. In the beginning, the piano’s deeply resonant consonances formed a backdrop to the violin’s harsh, scraping noises and disjunct, out-of-tune activity. Then, a flurry of fast string writing set off a complex piano arpeggio that seemed like an extension of the violin’s resonance.

Episodes of fast runs and scales were echoed and amplified, as each performer tended to distort and reinterpret what the other had just done. There was a sense of mutual discovery — a kind of dialogue about how the two instruments might relate to one another in strikingly new ways, while conjuring up a group of sound images that were both fascinating and beautiful.

Cindy Cox’s Turner, for viola and piano, is in many ways a similar kind of piece. Here the viola, played by Ellen Ruth Rose, used open strings and natural harmonics to find amplifying echoes in the piano, played by the composer. But the exploration of complementary sounds was heard as an end in itself: attractive, but not leading to further transformations. Instead, the spacious interactions remained self-contained and static.

Ann Calloway’s Ballade for violin, horn, and piano, like the remaining two pieces on the program, was much more traditional, harking back to a post-Romantic style. There were modal elements and a somewhat folk-inspired idiom, like music by Vaughan Williams. The work had a pastoral charm, influenced by the horn, but its deft ensemble writing needed more of a bite, and possibly some unusual touches, to create a stronger impression.

Donald Crockett’s Wet Ink was well-played by violinist Victor Romasevich and pianist Marilyn Thompson. It contained some brilliant violin writing, but there were too many musical cliches in a generic tonal context.

The seventh work (performed by Ann Miller, violin; Nina Flyer, cello; and Sonia Leong, piano) was Derek Jacoby’s Piano Trio No. 2, which sounded self-conscious in its swooping and sighing romanticism, dominated by the strings. When the piano emerged, it was in a simplistically postmodern vein. At the end, a needlessly prolonged set of slow, repeated notes for the violin gradually and predictably faded into nothingness, as we in the audience waited impatiently for closure.

For example, the most memorable moments of Andrew Imbrie’s From Time to Time were the recurring cello solos, played by Conservatory graduate student Michelle Kwon. The phrasing in each solo was exquisitely chiseled, imbuing the line with an ever-growing sense of urgency that culminated in a quasicadenza of striking lyricism near the end of the piece. Her careful pacing was especially compelling, as that passage coincided with a surprising harmonic shift in the music that seemed unusually wistful for Imbrie.

Yet Kwon is not listed beneath the piece on the program, nor as an “artist” in the biography section. Her name only appears three pages from the end as a member of the New Music Ensemble, alongside three other cellists, in alphabetical order. In other words, there’s no way to tell which students played on which piece.

In the spirit of overt (and laudable) political themes, I will simply add that the entire ensemble performed with a clarity and attention to detail I’m used to hearing from professional ensembles. Their contributions to the performance should be listed clearly in the program so that listeners can more easily remember their names as they progress in their careers.

Tolling of the Dead

Zooming out to a broader political thread: Consider John Halle’s Homage. The text consisted of the names of people killed during the Iraq war, some supplemented with brief biographical details and circumstances surrounding their deaths. Four speakers delivered the text in a variety of combinations, from calm, natural speech in alternation to something approaching the cacophony of pundits speaking over one another on — well, pick any 24-hour cable news station.

This was certainly the riskiest piece on the bill. What type of musical setting, I wondered, could possibly be appropriate to accompany the names in the text? I had strong reactions to both Homage and John Harbison’s Abu Graib, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate the external events themselves from “purely” musical impressions.

At one extreme, I found myself becoming annoyed by perfectly ordinary performance practices that normally wouldn’t sway my attention. For example, a glance from one of the speakers to the conductor, waiting for a cue to announce the next name in the list. Why, I thought, must the recitation of a list of casualties from an ongoing atrocity line up rhythmically, or at all, with the music? What could possibly add depth to hearing the names of the deceased “Daughters of Jamil Mohammed” or “Eric T. Jimenez” in this context?

These are, however, specific forms of general musical questions that all composers, including myself, should spend more time contemplating. I admire both Harbison and Halle for confronting a fundamental quality of music that, unfortunately, many composers seem to wish didn’t exist. Although Harbison’s quotation of Silent Night toward the end of Abu Graib seemed formally clumsy and derivative of Charles Ives, the simplicity of the statement had a palpable force.

Carla Kihlstedt

The passage of time makes Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together and Attica (1971) less problematic to comment on. For Coming Together, the music’s seemingly endless circularity derives its beauty from a (quite literal) connection with the last line of the text, written by an inmate of Attica Prison, the scene of murderous rioting, in which he proclaims the “feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.” In this performance, Carla Kihlstedt, as the speaker, lent a multifoliate theatricality to the inexorable unity of the ensemble passagework. There was a shrewd, methodical kind of erotic charge to Kihlstedt’s stage presence, always moving her hand over her inner thigh at the line “… seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others.” William Hackenberg’s electric bassline shored up the groove for this movement.

All the music in this BluePrint concert was preceded by a preconcert showing of Outside-In, a gripping documentary about the people in contact with death row inmates at San Quentin Prison. This made for a full evening of politically charged film and music, which no doubt will continue as BluePrint continues to program provocative works like these.

Gino Robair

The idea behind the Potluck is “found art” — realizing novelty in nonartistic, everyday articles. Robair improvises with a pile of objects provided to him by the audience. The “instruments” submitted on Sunday varied from the metallic to the plastic to the organic, but playing a key role were a pair of mechanical vibrators that looked suspiciously like sex toys. The most unexpected feature of Robair’s performance was his use of a microphone. He crushed the mic into a bouquet of dried flowers, shoved it into the bell of a saxophone, pumped it into some cardboard tubes, and rubbed it against the floor, the table, and any other surface available to him. The vibrators provided an ostinato to the whole performance, rattling, buzzing, clanging, and whispering, depending on which surface they were placed against.

The performance was engaging on a musical level because it had rhythmic drive, sonic variety, and a discernible form. The idea was engaging on a conceptual level, as well — there’s something heartwarming about seeing a respected, grown man sit on the floor and invent toys with the vivid playfulness and rich imagination of a child. Yet Robair also possesses the disciplined know-how of an educated artist. The sounds were new and exciting, and the vibe was entertaining.

Anti–Bel Canto Opera

Opening the concert was Robair’s I, Norton, a one-act opera about a mentally unbalanced person who fancied himself “Emperor Norton” and gained notoriety in 19th-century San Francisco. The actual Norton made plenty of valid sociological points, but his demeanor and declamations garnered him a quizzical respect. In the opera, the craziness of this character’s mind was translated into music.

The work has an air of humor juxtaposed with terror. Norton’s pronouncements were read by Tom Duff as he paced about the stage distractedly. As the piece went on, his lines became more disjointed, battling the instruments and the electronic alterations of his voice.

Soprano Aurora Josephson’s part was notated in Morse Code–like rhythmic series, combined with a table laying out 64 wordless sounds producible by the human voice. Many of those sounds are rarely heard outside the zoo. Other sounds were at the limits of human capability — guttural sobs, erotic shrieks, and animalistic yelps. The experience was discomforting, as some of these raw noises are not usually shared in public. You can’t get any farther away from bel canto. It was a courageous effort by Josephson.

The instrumentalists also performed a wide array of sounds — glissandos, scratches, trills, tremolos, and, believe it or not, even some conventionally sounded long notes, which, in the anything-goes context, sounded as weird as anything else. The instrumental parts were mostly improvised, their texture chosen by Robair via a set of hand gestures. The orchestra was his palette while he improvised the overall progression of the piece.

Machine Music

Electronics played a huge role in the concert — it still feels weird to see performers seated at laptops alongside clarinetists and violinists. The machine operators busily punched keys as their frowning faces were lit up by their computer screens. At one point, the vocalists imitated the computer-processed snippets of their own voices.

The most surprising aspect of I, Norton was its length: At the end of the performance, 45 minutes had passed. It felt more like 25, a truly time-altering and mind-altering experience.

The concert featured three other pieces. Memnosyne by Eric Ulman (who also performed superbly on the violin) was a small ensemble piece that required a lot of patience late on a Sunday night. It could easily be dismissed as random high-pitched squeaks. But beyond the lack of obvious contrast and the incomprehensibility glowed a delicate statement of understated beauty.
Mathias Spahlinger’s Aussageverweigerung/Gegendarstellung: Zwei Kontra-Kontexte für Doppelquartett (Refutations/Counterstatements: Two contra-contexts for double quartet; 1981) featured tension-filled strikes that grew tighter and tauter in each sequence until finally it all snapped, unleashing a torrent of wild sounds from the unconventional ensemble. Gérard Grisey’s Talea (1986) was a similar exercise in unconventionality and exploration of the acoustic instruments’ sonic extremes.